Glancing in my direction they speak quietly leaning one to the other. Outside Asian and African nuns walk by with shiny black briefcases, white veils contrasting with their dark features and the black limousine waiting to take the feasting clergymen back to the Vatican. On Via Condotti the pretty Gucci girl, bending down to put shoes on a fur-coated moustached matron, winks at me with her pert bottom while over at Brioni a security guard theatrically stops me taking photographs of a black raincoat reduced to a month’s salary. I want to show this to my mother, who tired of life but not money will make more of it than my story of gold and silvered sacred vestments in the tiresome Vatican museum. Near the Borgese a young couple on a bench, she facing him on his lap, darkness falling, stop gyrating when we walk by talking earnestly about the marble creases in Pauline’s couch and how Bernini could have done it, and what time we will eat after a rest and a bath, and how to get back to our small hotel, and how cold it is in this dim park and what is lurking behind the growling bushes surrounding us.
