DOME

By now, we would be sitting in someone's flat, pushing drink toward day, and I would go to the window and part the heavy red curtains with one hand extended flat-palmed and flaglike into the cleft there, stepping out onto a balcony with a low iron railing jutting over the street, feeling at once the city's solidity, the time-killing gnarl of stone settled and grown into stone, and its precarious balance, the chance shift of a block over its fulcrum plunging one down into the gray rock night of the light-stained street-down which, having picked oneself up with aching bones, one half-expected to see advancing a hooded procession bearing torches and smelling of tar, sweat and blood, remnants of a lost order of dialect, clanking their weapons and boots under robes. The next day could turn into a string of days, a lost week or two or three or four, at the vanishing point of which Gaja and I, coming awake sitting on a long stairway somewhere or walking round and round in a square or standing on a bridge over the river, would shake the wax out of our ears and ask, What have we been doing? I'd purchased a second-hand camera, but dropped it into the river; we'd searched Dome for the perfect notebooks, then left them behind in cafés full of tourists and little old native ladies eating pastries alone. Back to the city and Luchjo getting his head bandaged, Georgo patching things up at the restaurant, charming them in his perfect dialect, please accept my young friend's apologies, allow me to make it up to you over dinner, at an indoor table of course, and the young couple whose table Luchjo had split down one side catapulting into the air a first course along with the dessert being enjoyed next door looking at each other and shrugging okay, and the rest of my friends looking down from the window, fangs retracted momentarily.