Letters ✏️ Rome
Times New Roman
Uno
It bothers me that everything I write is really nothing at all. I can't even aspire to the relevance of Giovanni, the ice-cream vendor, who takes thick euros with one hand, and gives back giant cones of ice-cream with the other. People pay money for things. But what do I offer? Words. Which is fine when words are printed in ink and stamped onto paper. And when these pieces of paper are placed on top of each other and presented to the world in a book. As if you'd actually done something.
But now paper’s almost impossible to find. Who carries a pen these days? Book shops have become curiosity shops, with feathered three-legged chairs in one corner and the complete works of Charles Dickens in the next.
Imagine, Dickens would etch words with an iron quill right into the paper! Then some monstrous machine straight out of the Industrial Revolution would hammer black letters into flattened trees, and everyone would run into the street to get that week's instalment of The Pickwick Papers. Papers. I can hardly believe it, but here it is on my iPhone, straight from Wikipedia.
And now it’s gone. My BBC app just alerted me to the latest schoolgirl slaughter by Boko Harum, somewhere in northeastern Nigeria. How can my words compete with that?
Giovanni hands a boy an enormous cherry ice-cream, which makes the boy's eyes twice as big as they already were. The crimson cherries circle into the cream, leaving pastel streaks along the surface of the white mountaintops. The swirling colour reminds the boy of a spinning top, the one he used to play with for hours on the dingy floor of their kitchen. He'd concentrate on the colours and on the sound of it spinning, to drown out the sound of his mom and dad shouting at each other. He waited with bated breath for it crash to the ground, spinning noisily out of his control.
After five minutes, the ice cream too is gone. All that's left of it is the words.
Due
An angry-looking tourist is fighting with his wife. She barks at him, The kids have had enough ice-cream today. Do I always have to be the disciplinarian? The tourist steps up to the counter all the same. To record his triumph, he films the whole thing on his iPhone video. He gets close-ups of their bewilderment at the Italian names, and of their certainty that each of the two dozen flavours is exactly the one they want. Julie's eyes are bigger than cherries.
The tourist digitalizes the whole thing: the way Julie says Grat say! and the way Giovanni breaks into a beaming smile. What the iPhone doesn’t catch is the way Giovanni remembers the look on his own little girl's face. Alessandra’s sunny disposition. Her big dark eyes alive to everything around her — until she was run over by a cab three doors down from their apartment. Alessandra’s love of cherry ice-cream.
Now Giovanni remembers her smile as a composite of the smiles of all the little girls who ask for cherry ice-cream. And when the tourist's daughter said Grat say! he thought he heard Alessandra's voice, even through the foreign accent. The timbre, tone, and clarity were miraculously the same, as if one girl had disappeared into thin air and then three years later reappeared right there, where he last saw Alessandra standing in front of the bucket of cherry ice-cream.
The iPhone has no way of recording Giovanni's thoughts and feelings. All that's left are the words.
Due to the meticulous operations of her delicate tongue, Julie's ice cream lasts nine full minutes. But what’s going on in her head is another story.
Tre
✏️
Next: ✏️ The Collected Works of Humpty Dumpty
Contents - Characters - Glossary: A-F∙G-Z - Maps - Storylines