The Rotten Bridge, A Gypsy Love Story

By Paul McConnell

Facing an ultimatum from Cassi, his girlfriend of six years, Mac flips a coin and loses himself in his ancestral Italy. He soon meets YaYa, a young, fire-eating, gypsy-punk barista who is avoiding the law and the destitution of the Roman streets. He extends his dirty umbrella to her and she warily accepts.
Their story begins along the Tiber River, facing an isolated span of marble from 200 BC known as Il Ponte Rotto, or the Rotten Bridge. Over the centuries this archway has rejected every attempt to rebuild it and at the same time, has refused to fall, to give way to the mythic river completely.
This is Mac and YaYa’s love story in a metaphoric nutshell, a story that frames a narrative feast of dog napping, stalking, erectile dysfunction, and public seat licking. Throughout, Mac is held at arms length by the whims of her “shithead” as she calls it, and he must battle his restless heart and fend off constant reminders of Cassi who has announced her impending visit.
The Rotten Bridge is Mac’s soliloquy of desire, written on the walls of ancient Rome to those who have forgotten what it feels like to want to die in love. It is a raw book, with an edgy, burlesque prose style that bares all and forces those in it’s wake to consider the compromises we make, and our need to renew ourselves and believe again.
There is an old Roman saying that to cross the Tiber is to have gone too far. In search of their story, Mac and YaYa cross that line, guided by the footlights of the Ponte Rotto, and it is a rotten bridge indeed, one that “always keeps breaking”, as YaYa tells Mac their first night along the river.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul McConnell
• Release date: Apr 7, 2011
• ISBN: 9781452432908

Paul McConnell

Paul McConnell lives in the land of sun and smog. He has written several books and intends to write more. He maintains a training wheels website at hairypaul.com and can be reached for further epistatic commentary at [e-mail].

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The Rotten Bridge

A Gypsy Love Story

By Paul McConnell

Smashwords Edition Copyright © 2011 by Paul McConnell

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Part 1.

1.

I am coming to see YaYa and if you must that is the plot. That is always the plot. I’ve hung up my rail pass and the keys to my other life and I am drowning in a river of her. But let explain before I lose my breath, while I can still conjure her. Tonight I boarded a boat in defiance of anything sensible. You see a ferocious storm was battering the island and my stomach was doing flips ever since the pizzeria where I had to ask the waitress to turn on the water so I could use the toilet. Even the plumbing was rotten.

Really all the place had going for it was the waitress, the proprietor’s daughter, and isn’t that how it always goes—a shy girl with a stammer and bad teeth and yet homely good looks that somehow pull you in?

The truth is she reminded me of my sweet Cassi back home. Not her teeth really, or even her looks. Just because. Because I was missing her right then and she used to tell me stories about being an awkward young girl working at a Pizza Hut in Pennsylvania.

In Cassi’s stories as an only child she is stranded on an island too with nothing but her imagination. When she was a teenager all the boys made fun of her because deep down they were afraid she might actually say yes. She told me as much herself. Anybody that was nice to her, she said.

I get the same feeling with this one, standing in her mother's pizzeria in her wallpapered world of rock and roll. As she takes my order she points to posters and playbills from concerts she swears she's attended all over the world, mostly from monster rock bands whose heyday was before her time. She even has concert ticket stubs that put her at two ends of the earth on subsequent weeks and tour shirts to prove it.

She goes on about them while I eat. I can't take a bite without her. She arrived with the pizza like a condiment and sprinkled herself at my elbow, talking with a slowness that made me want to chew through the table. And now it was a tug of war between the cheese and her monologue and I didn't want to know about it. I was already sick of her suffering.

I put my head down and ate the rotten pizza. This poor girl was marooned on the island of Sardegna with a virtual link to the outside world and I wanted to strangle her with her apron. I wanted to put her on a lifeboat once and for all. I swear I would’ve bought her a ticket to Rome right then and helped her find a real live concert if I thought that’s what she wanted. But that would’ve made her sad. She would’ve felt dumb and cheated by her life.

She was better off dee-jaying from the kitchen where she was safe. She'd never catch on fire at a club that was over capacity and she'd never wake up alone in a busted-up hotel room. Maybe I should have listened to her broken record. She probably could have helped me. She probably could have sat me down outside and made me listen to that howling wind and those crazy birds hiding in the trees and she might have said something about devotion, about Cassi living out her own sentence of seven years with her vices intact, waiting for me to say yes to a family, waiting for me to come home from a summer romp in Europe, grown-up and acting like a man.

But that's rear-view tenderness after what I've done. Besides, I've already called YaYa, and if she didn't exactly jump at my idea to come to Rome, she didn't say no either. It would be worth the rough trip across the sea just to surprise her and see her face although I didn't expect a homecoming. She was about to lose her apartment because of me, and her job, and her old man was forever moving out, a tenuous balancing act than required more than the dirty umbrella I was offering.

I finished my meal and tipped the pizza girl. She stood in front of me, staring at my beat-up army pack, and dusting the flour from her delicate arms, while she mouthed the words to some U2 anthem. Her mother, who had been keeping an eye on me from behind the counter, now came out to say good-bye and shake her daughter free. She dried her hands on her apron and smiled. I was still their only customer. I got the feeling that if I grabbed the girl and walked her out of there no one would protest. I could take her to Rome just for the company and then pimp her off for being so pathetic. At least that’s what her mother’s eyes were telling me.

I stood up and lingered. I wanted to say something—that I was content, that the pizza was good, that they had a nice place but I couldn’t lie in their tongue. Instead I bought a melted ice cream and hiked to the tram that would take me to the harbor.

At the port cafe, after a couple of beers to steady my stomach, I went to the gift shop to buy some wine for the trip because that is how you make friends in the cheap seats, especially on the overnight leg.

I know because I’m always seated next to the lunatics. Recently I shared a train cabin with a Romanian prostitute who was border crossing illegally to work. She was going home on the red-eye with two very heavy duffel bags that I helped her situate.

Along the way, because we had nothing but my wine, she opened one of her body bags to show me that it was filled to the zipper with tiny cellophane packages that squeaked like mice when she dug in with her hands.

She sifted through them like a prospector and fed me, having me compare the different cakes and fillings, telling me they were like gold to her, and that to have them at home, locked in her bedroom, where she could play with them, stack them, cupboard them and select them was forty pounds of individually wrapped heaven.

Speaking of the cheap seats—there are those that will come later, like the fat German man on the long haul, the mountain that will roll over me and fart like a landslide in the night all the way from Naples to Rome. The one who will run fluids in the morning from every orifice as though the daylight has pierced holes in him. The one who will press his body into mine and make me visit Cassi with my free hand. If only I have the courage to open some wine ahead of time perhaps, but we will have to wait and see.

And then there is YaYa, the cause of all this, as she proposes to me, sitting on the floor between train cars, speaking of the next time she sees me and how I will go away again, almost in the same breath.

I could go on. But why? And why me, I wonder? What unlikely companions do I merit or confer?

In my defense I am not always such a willing partner but an empty bottle between strangers is a good book. And here, tonight, on this boat, another loose bunch, connected by the criminal underclass, and I hand them cigarettes and pour wine into styrofoam cups which I don’t like to use because they crackle like foil on your teeth.

I lift my glass and settle in for a rough night, glancing over two rows at a family sleeping under a single blanket. I could be next to them I guess—but it is the luck of the draw really. Both rows of seats were empty when I boarded and sat down. Somehow it is just my lot.

Later when I tell YaYa these stories, of all the attention and hospitality I’ve encountered, she will say it is because of me. The idea of it will please her though I can’t tell you why. Deep down I know it’s a lie. She will say that I am not a typical American, and there is that word again—simpatico—that I keep hearing, and that others can tell right off. I don’t take that as a compliment. I am very much an American, perhaps even among the worst of them. How does she not see that?

But I have lost myself again. The plot! Always the plot!

Back in Sardegna I stood on a sidewalk in Sassari in the rain with a forty-pound pack on my back, rotten pizza tearing my insides, as I consulted the cracked heavens and contemplated my next move.

Like I said, I knew well ahead of the coin toss where I was going, but the ritual has become important to me. The few Sardi's that were caught outside in the storm seemed to appreciate my sidewalk performance. I knew those old shepherds still prayed to the rocks and the wind and I figured it wouldn't hurt to have a few witnesses around in case I washed up later on the town.

I held up the oversized coin, an untarnished Kennedy from my childhood that I carry in a special flap of my wallet. It was like greeting an old friend and lately we had become very close. I spat on him and shined him a little and then I warmed him up in my palms like a pair of dice. Naturally, for full dramatic effect I had already positioned myself directly across the street from the Tyrennhia cruise line offices and I looked at it like this—that there ahead of me were the ticket counters and salespeople, and behind them a few streets, the harbor, and beyond that the sea, and thereafter a short train ride to Rome, and there of course waited YaYa—an unbroken chain starting with my reflection in the cloud dark windows.

I will cross the stormy sea for her. I will come in the night and will not sleep. In fact, I will stand on the moonlit prow for much of it, facing the gale-spit, and I will see her round face brooding on the sea, a pale green light wrapped under her chin, her big eyes love broke, the question formed partway on her generous lips and I might as well admit it, because it's true: I kissed those lethean waters that first night of her along the Tiber and fell in for good. Leaning in over the edge I caught the green breath of the dizzy current like a nipple on my upper lip and I have not been able to let go.

And now, stopping the boat in its tracks, she wants to know why? I answer her, knowing that everything passes, by kissing each eye whole again.

Is this sea crossing idiotic beyond the normal turn of events I wonder? I’ve yet to see this woman’s bed—though I have failed miserably with her elsewhere. Of course, when she learns of it, Cassi, for all her love and patience back home, will never speak to me again even though I pretend it is out of my hands, the result of a haphazard coin toss.

Is this romance or ridicule? I let in the voices of my other life, of those who would critique me from their desks or standing over diaper, of those who have forgotten what it feels like to want to die in love because that is how much you want to believe.

Why? They still want to know. Because the Tiber runs out to the sea, I answer, and it refuses no one. Because everything else becomes a lie if you wait long enough. Cassi back home planning a nursery and a wedding all to herself. Titti ramming her little buttercup into the corner of her office desk longing for me to return like the wind. The rotten pizza girl and her bad teeth. Springsteen. The Rolling Stones. Kiss. The Cure. Motorhead. U2. The World Wide Web. All the auctions and collections in her head and that other one, that bag of confectionary sugar behind the iron curtain. Bad teeth and a fucked out pussy. One big cavity of hunger and isolation everywhere you look. That’s why. Because I want to believe in something again. And I’ll keep flipping the coin until I get the answer I want.

2.

When the train pulls in at Termini I am relieved. I have finished something. It is like the end of a good chapter, or a book even. I have gone and come back and in a sense I am home. That is what Rome feels like and I am no sooner off the train than I am absorbed into the derelict familiarity around the station.

I cross over the pebbled walkways, behind the used bookstalls at the Piazza del Cinquecento, avoiding puddles of urine, to walk along the sculpture garden at the baths of Diocletian. I turn up the via Volturno and salute the familiar shops and cafes along the way. I cross the street to get a better look at Green Eyes, the girl at the parfumerie who sold me the potion that did nothing for YaYa. I pull into a familiar bar for a coffee—a bitter freddo that is so cold it hurts my teeth.

This is my neighborhood and I greet it like an old friend.

A short month ago I stumbled onto this land of my ancestors, having arrived on a second class train with a forty-pound pack that smelled like a Parisian phone booth. The next morning I woke to the scent of fresh laundry dripping on a line and mixing with potted basil on the balcony of my pensione. I got out of bed and put my feet down on the cool terrazzo floor and that's when I knew. I laid down and got up again, and again, and several more times. Up and down like that, the soles of my feet conforming to the uneven tile floor as if from a lifetime of such mornings.

Before I left the U.S. my father pressed me into contacting his last known relative, his great aunt, whom his mother was named after. She lived in Naples and no one in my family had ever met her. In three generations only my grandfather, who was shot on the Adriatic coast during WWII, and my father, a scullion in the Navy during Vietnam, had ever been to Italy.

In fact my father's ship pulled in to port near Rome the day I was born. A passing U.S. warship flashed the news to him as they did then by semaphore. There I was bounced across these flat blue waters of no return for the very first time, a curious cipher of safety orange signaling ship to ship, two entire machines of war tied up in a silent communication about a boy.

I once carried a black and white deckle-cut picture of my father taken later that evening. In it he has run aground, drunk on the news of his first child, and is swimming in a Roman fountain after having sampled a bit of the sweet life. There he was- the picture taken by one of his mates who no doubt saw him back to the ship safely- in his navy whites, all one hundred and thirty of him soaked down and draped over the jaws of some mythological beast like a wounded Popeye.

That is the story of my birth in my father's head and heart, as solid a man as there is, a man who had already found the joys of family to be his calling and wasn't searching for anything but a ticket home.

Next I draw up along the market on Via Vicenza and now I am really home. These are the many faces among the carts of hosiery and earth-ripe produce that I have spent mornings with fresh from my bed at Luna. Day in and day out they are here, except Sunday, and it is always the same procession only I am coming upon them in reverse now, because Luna, or Pensione Katy, is to the other side.

I walk past the hanging bolts of fabric brought here across trade routes from the East, over the great Salt Road perhaps. There are the sun-burnt leather wallets and belts from Tuscany; the baby clothing and lingerie from sex and population centers like Romania or China; the thin socks and t-shirts that are a friend to the besmirched traveler; there is the latest in colorful house-wear from Africa; robes and pant suits and slippers that vomit rainbow hues into the grimy basalt cobbles. And then of course, anything else you want in this open-air emporium, from apples to zippers, it is all here—and if not, just ask and they will bring it tomorrow.

I stop to buy some peaches and cherries for the Signora, by way of dropping in on her and her family at the height of summer without warning. I also pick up a newspaper, at the corner stand where the old man is straining against the back of his little plywood kiosk, against the porno magazines and lottery tickets, trying to avoid even the slightest contact with the July sun. As usual he overcharges me for the USA Today, which I read because I can—it is in English. In any case, I don’t mind this one’s game. I think of him as the gatekeeper. Even at double the cost it is a small price to enter the city on these mornings with America tucked up safe under my arm or in my back pocket where it can do no harm.

On my way up the street toward Luna, I pass the Cafe Montenegro, where usually I can find the Signora’s in-law whom I call the Jockey. Then I actually run into my dear sweet pensioner as I’m going in to the Alimentari for some salami and bread. She is with her daughter and they have just finished the morning shopping.

Signora is as excitable as ever. She slaps me like one of her own, cracking a sharp Eh? a two-letter accusation that places the guilt of some past wrong against her on my shoulders—for not calling, for not coming straight to them, rather than dallying at the market, for paying too much for fruit maybe, or not sending a postcard as directed from every town along the way.

Who knows, it could even be something from before my time, from Vittorio’s time even, her dead husband up there on that shelf over the kitchen table, may he rest forever in peace.

Now our attention is turned to Gabriella—she is starting to show. Luna gives me the side-glance, bulges her eyes and turns her mouth down, at the same time rounding out her own stomach with a sweep of her hand.

Eh? she says, nodding the seriousness of the matter, and this time it means something else obviously. She is counseling me as though I were an uncle to the family.

I nod in return. I approve I am saying to them and then I smile. Now there is laughter and commotion and the Signora is talking a mile a minute and Gabriella, recovering from her slight embarrassment at being held up for inspection, picks out a few words, here and there for me, in English.

Luna is back to chastising me for not calling. She is a sly businesswoman and she knows that I am a soft touch.

The room is taken, but how long, she wonders, do I want to stay? And what can I pay? Whatever is fair, I say, but only if it can be worked out. I am happy to be a regular part of their operation. There is even a room they refer to as my own. After all I was their first paid lodger, coming to them on the heels of another Signora from down the street who could not keep me another day. She walked me to Luna’s in her gray apron and housedress one summer morning when things were slow and life around the apartment floor was quiet and dull. Suddenly there was a ‘guest’ and another mouth to feed and she rushed around cleaning and we sat up and talked about ways to increase her newly realized business that would one day support her burgeoning family.

Come back later and it will all be fixed, the daughter tells me.

They offer to take my pack the rest of the way but it is too heavy and they are already burdened.