Andrew, fueled primarily by the sun, is powered up by the time I wake. “WE ARE GOING TO THECOLI-SEE UMM!” he tells me and anyone within a few miles. Rob Roy, very eager to pass on his love of antiquity, does not help the situation: “Where are we going, Andrew?” he asks, and Andrew says “The… THE COLLYSEEUM!” I find this a little less charming the fourth time, but the church historian does not. (Jack-Jack adds, “Babammmamalaaa.”)
We are also going to the Forum, and we are going to walk there. I anticipate Andrew spending some of this fervor by the time we arrive. “!!!!” says Jack, in what I assume is assent.
It’s another pure, bright day. Sun tickles brick. Andrew is curious about every motor vehicle he sees, and not very scared of them. I pluck him out of the street and stand him on a stone wall. Below, there are fragments of markets from the empire: doddering columns and stone foundations. I tell Andrew this is old Rome; Rome underneath the new one. I’m not sure if he gets it, until a mile later when he sees the Forum proper and alerts the earth, “THAT IS THE OLD ROME!”
He makes his father yet prouder when we turn down the main avenue towards the Coliseum itself. I’m holding his hand, and he is not holding mine – sometimes, I end up with his entire forearm; to keep him from vehicular suicide. I see no indication he knows or cares where we are, until he stiffens at the site of the old monument: “THAT… THAT IS THE COLISEUM!” he points, shaking. Rob Roy gives him a high five, beaming I think audibly.
First, though, the Forum. We’re approaching nap time, and the boys revolt while we’re in the ticket line. I find this amusing about young children: they want so badly to sleep, which will solve literally every problem in their life that they are aware of. And yet they will fight sleep to the bitter, screaming edge of consciousness. When I say this is amusing, I mean as a construct and not an experience; like in the way jokes about Donald Trump are funny when he’s not in charge of the world’s largest military. The wailing and gnashing of tired little teeth does grind at the back of your skull; although it is genuinely hilarious when Andrew finds a garden with pebble bedding and makes a kind of snow angel, weeping about being three years old.
Last Word is trying to put out that fire while also putting Jack-Jack to sleep. She carries him in a backpack designed for children, which we think of as normal but must have been quite a difficult sales pitch at one time (“No, not to like, kidnap them; just to like carry them to places outside of the home!”). When she’s on the go, Word puts his tiny face against her back. When it’s naptime, he faces her. Sometimes he also gets stroller privileges, which are fiercely guarded by Andrew.
Right now, Jack-Jack is on Last Word’s back. Attuned as ever to madness in the universe, Jack-Jack is yelping and summoning. He’s learned to gesture for things he wants with a full-bodied, straight-armed grabbing motion; like he’s trying to beat a gnat to death. He’s giving me a lot of that, so I take him and stare at what he’s staring at, and we discuss. This actually calms him: as long as one of the larger humans can see what he’s seeing, he seems to feel safer in the universe. Fundamentally, I think he wants someone to tell him he isn’t crazy. Taking advantage of this break in hostilities, I try to teach him my name, by saying it very slowly and pointing to myself. He struggles mightily around the “uncle.” After a moment it appears he’s abandoned the effort; but abruptly, he stares me in the eyes and blurts: “Uncle [Sazerac]!” I think this probably not the best time to tell his mother that he likes me the best.
Eventually, the boys are sedated by their own mania and Last Word’s patience. Rob Roy and I walk the Palatine Hill and the Forum. I remember this feeling from years ago; visceral and nameless: the ages eroding between hillsides, for the amusement of Chinese with selfie-sticks. Vulgar and profound; sacred and profane. Very Italian, from before modern Italy.
I know better than to think of Rome as modern Italy because I am walking with Rob Roy. If you ever find yourself in the maw of antiquity, I strongly recommend bringing along your church historian, page-chewing, photographically recollective brother-in-law; who has been your best friend since age eight. (I can only assume everyone has one of these.) I don’t need a tour guide: I point and say “What’s that?” – not unlike Andrew – and R.R. regales me with a detailed history of the thing I’m pointing at. It makes the entire weekend magic: I know castles and churches before the sign. The day after this one, Rob Roy sees a fortress across a river, and says, “Oh, that must be Castel Sant’Angelo!” I always have to stuff the temptation to try to keep up, for the reasons I don’t challenge LeBron to pickup.
(R.R. would probably be very upset by this analogy, on the grounds that he is metaphorically merely a very talented college player, and not yet a professional, let alone a star; he would probably say this is as ridiculous as comparing him to one of the Plinys; because as you know one was Younger and one Elder, and I would nod because I couldn’t possibly locate their century or tell you which Pliny is the good one.)
There is always a cost to genius, though, and Rob Roy pays a bizarre wage. As we walk along weathered brick walls on the Palatine, he notes the different molds and substance making the walls: the fossil record of a city. “It’s funny, people come up here thinking everything’s just so old,” he scoffs. “They don’t realize that so much of this comes from the Middle Ages.” He’s in a good place, so I let him have that one.
Andrew wakes up his usual 50 minutes later. I tell him we’re in the Coliseum, and he looks around to see if he believes me. We’re in the guts of the outer ring; drowned in foot traffic and away from views of the fighting pit. We can, however, see outside through the fences. Andrew is struck by electricity: he points, shaking: “It’s a ‘MENT MIXER! A [ce]MENT MIXER!” (I’m pretty sure Shelley has some shit about that.)
Inside, I get to stand Andrew on walls and show him the ruin. “Is THAT the COLISEUM?” he asks.
“Yeah, yeah it is.”
His face grows determined. He tests me: “Is THAT the Coliseum?”
“Andrew, it’s all the Coliseum.”
It’s a cliché to say that some clichés are clichés because they’re true. It’s also a cliché to, as a man, talk circles around your feelings: Andrew stares out over the rocks and walls, and shows a child’s wonder, and it makes my heart very big. I pull him off the wall and we go looking for his parents.
The next morning, I’m woken by a cold yank on my big toe. I pull the sheet off my head, and find Jack-Jack beaming at me. He has walked to the couch and is bracing himself on one of the legs. “Uncle [Sazerac]!” he chirps.
I may have started something here.
I flag down a speeding Andrew and ask him about his day. “Did you see the Coliseum?” I ask him.
“Mmmmm…” – he does this sometimes; gathering both thoughts and thermonuclear energy as he ponders your question – “YES! I saw the COLISEUM! and the… the OLD ROME! And there was a ‘MENT MIXER! TWO ‘MENT MIXERS!”
I envy Andrew. When I leave here, I leave the Coliseum behind. Wherever he’s going, there are probably cement mixers.
—
Saint Peter’s is tough. You have to do it, but the process is awful: you line up and scuffle outside the basilica to get your moment to scuffle inside the basilica. It’s a return to China, in that I’m crushed by other humans who are bad at forming lines; and also because I hear at least as much Mandarin as English. The lines are poorly designed by the liners, but also by the staff; who are Italian and are enjoying the day like you, and not really emotionally invested in crowd management. I admire this, personally. I admire less the setup of the security checkpoint: everyone funnels toward a small x-ray machine from 1977 monitored sporadically by a beautiful Italian man. Bags and belts and keys are placed in a bin, which rolls creaking through the machine. The key here is that there is only one tray per machine, and only three machines. Adding, like, three trays would increase efficiency by 100%, mathematically. My sister says she wants to get seed money for a startup that solely manufactures trays for Italian tourist sites. This is such a solid quip that I am stealing it now.
St. Peter’s is also tough because once you’re inside, you see opulence that staggers imagination. Years before, I saw it with my parents; jet-lagged and thirsty. But the sensation, upon entrance, floods me; familiar as if I’d been going every weekend since that one eight years ago. The sensation is a very dark awe, not far left of nausea. It makes me dizzy.
Since the most battered and idealistic of my demographic took Zuccotti Park, it’s been vogue to talk percentage: the top group has it all; we down low suffer. I grew up in money, without realizing it; because there was even more money around me, and I was sheltered, religiously (the adverb there goes both ways, though if I tried going both ways I was assured Hell was maybe literal minutes away). And because I grew up in money without understanding it, I still flinch conservative: I see Bernie Sanders telling people the billionaires took their money, and it seems ludicrous: no one sent men in black cars to take your sofa. Our financial designs can be vile and stupid without physical theft and grand conspiracy. But then you go walking in Manhattan, and see glass palaces paid for by air and mystery; and you know you will never walk in the high floors. And you know that they were not made for you, and that though you were born near the top there are heights you cannot reach, and you can measure those heights to the inch. And it occurs to you both things can be true: a crank from Vermont with the policy nuance of a sledgehammer and an inexhaustible reservoir of masturbatory pride can be exactly that; and the emotion he articulates can also be the morally accurate response to an oligarchy on your porch.
When they built St. Peter’s, the oligarchs didn’t need to argue before the Senate that they deserved their position, and the kings were called King, and if you crossed somebody above you men came and you went away; and not just in Russia and China. When a palace had to be built, money was got; from everywhere. The gold in St. Peters drips from the roof, and dries in spirals and leaves. The wealth of centuries spilled out of a bucket; itself stained in gems and left as a ceiling. There is marble a thousand feet deep; there is stone and silver you can’t find the back of. Famously, there are caskets in corners of the tremendous space: noted clerics of one station or another. But it is not for that reason that feel, with every step I take, the crunch of bones under my heel. Wherever there is a temple, there is a grave. This is the largest temple I’ve ever seen. A temple to worship the god who said: if you want to be perfect, go; sell what you have and give to the poor.
Of course, this god also said that if a man divorces his wife and marries another, that man commits adultery. And he said that he did not come to bring peace, but a sword; to divide families in His name (n.b. it worked). So the Italians just aren’t really into Jesus. They assume they are, because they have a staggering cross-per-capita density. But that’s because they have Italian Jesus, who is different. Italian Jesus likes pretty things and pretty people, and drives a very elegant sports car. He sometimes contradicts himself. But at least he’s less of a droning chore than Progressive American Jesus, who turned water into PBR so that all marveled, “Teacher, I want to believe; but I for real can’t taste the difference.”
St. Peter’s is tough specifically for Andrew, because he has been hiking around Rome for two days and he is very small. While we are still in line outside, he wanders over a barrier and curls up for a nap; right in St. Peter’s Square. (Notably, Italian security does not prevent this.) Inside, he drags and slumps. He is passed from Last Word to me, as we try to give Rob Roy appropriate marveling space. Andrew walks until he sobs, and when he sobs he crumples: “I don’t WANNA bee-yin here,” he weeps. Trying to play the game I that worked for Jack, I lift Andrew’s tiny, pouting frame onto my shoulders. I point up at the gold: speckled like stars across a canopy of oil and marble. For a moment, it works; and it’s a beautiful moment: he stares far up; hundreds of times his height, at the grim majesty above him. His mouth drops open and he sniffles.
But it’s just a moment: he remembers that he is upset, and he also remembers that he does not like to lose any negotiation, so his mouth curls down and the tears fall. When I bring him down to the floor, he kicks his own legs to the side and hangs like a rag doll. “Buhammfprhhth-AUUWWAHNG!” he explains. It’s time for Rob to pick him up. There are limits to an uncle’s power.
There are also limits to an uncle’s responsibility: as the others wander out, I stop against traffic and stare up and around and over. Life is long until it isn’t: the places I see I may never see again. In this case, I am not certain that I mind.