Without Reservations_ The Travels of an Independent Woman - Alice Steinbach [94]
In the evenings I’d sit there drinking wine and smoking an occasional cigarette, a habit I’d retrieved after the attempted mugging. I’d wait until the light faded and the lamps came on over the Spanish Steps before walking up the hill to have dinner at the usual place. Afterward I would return and, wrapped in a blanket, sit outside looking at the stars.
On my last night in Rome the rains came, turning my veranda into a shallow swimming pool. Reluctantly, I abandoned my usual routine. Instead I propped myself up in bed and turned to my old friend Freya, hoping to find comfort and, perhaps, advice in her books, her observations. As usual, she did not disappoint.
“The unexpectedness of life, waiting round every corner, catches even wise women unawares,” she wrote. “To avoid corners altogether is, after all, to refuse to live.”
Reading this, I let out a small shriek of recognition. It was as though someone in charge had said to me: not guilty. Permission granted to continue on with your life as usual.
It would take some time, I knew, to regain my confidence about approaching life’s corners. But, as Freya pointed out, avoiding them would be the same as saying “no” to life. And I wasn’t about to do that.
I had been asleep for only an hour or two when a loud, booming sound awakened me. For one wild moment I thought a bomb had exploded. I sat upright, still groggy. Then I heard it again. Boom! It was even louder than the first one. Suddenly a great burst of light lit up my room. I ran to the veranda door and looked outside. Rain was pelting the empty streets below and forks of lightning illuminated the dark sky like arteries exposed on an X-ray. Thunder rolled across the city in great waves.
I looked at the clock. It was 3:00 A.M. I was already packed and ready to leave for Florence later that morning. If I went back to bed right away, I thought, I could catch maybe another three hours of sleep.
But I already knew I wasn’t going to do that. Instead I put on my Reeboks, threw a raincoat over my pajamas, and left the hotel. It was as impulsive an act as anything I’d ever done. But something in me said: never again will you have the opportunity to stand at the top of the Spanish Steps with Rome lit up and spread out beneath you.
Put that way, I had no choice.
Outside, the streets were empty. The lightning and thunder were now off in the distance, but the rain had not let up. Leisurely, almost playfully, I walked the short distance—a hundred feet or so—from my hotel to the top of the Spanish Steps. There, like a sentinel I stood watch over the sleeping city of Rome.
With the city stretched out beneath me I looked off into the distance, across the Tiber. I watched as silent flashes of lightning, like strobes going on and off, revealed briefly domes and towers and church spires set against the sky. For the first time I felt the ancient majesty of Rome. Caught up in the strange beauty of the storm, I imagined all the Romes buried beneath this one. It was like being back in Pompeii. Watching, my thoughts excavated the city back through the centuries, back to a time when all roads led to Rome.
As I stood at the top of the Spanish Steps—a temporary traveler passing through Rome, and through life, in anno Domini 1993—an intense feeling of awe and respect came over me. Rome had endured. And when I was gone from Rome, and from life, she would still endure. It was then that I bowed with respect, like a younger member of the tribe, to the wisdom and tradition possessed by this honorable elder.
When I returned to the hotel I was no longer sleepy. The rain had stopped