The evening air had cooled considerably as the sun set over Rome. The brisk breeze floating in through the open door of Il Flagello gave Max chills as he sat at the bar with a cold beer half drank, thinking. He was lost in thought and lost in his beer. He wondered what he was going to do next and how was the outcome going to pay off. A pang hit him in the heart, and he felt lousy again. He drank his beer half-heartedly registering the chatter between the regulars and the bar owner, Sergio.
“Did you hear Sergio? Eh, hai sentito?”
“Sentito? Heard what?” A man asked.
“They’re closing la Lombardia,” Sergio said assessing the thick white foam rising on top of the yellow liquid pouring into the tilted glass, waving like a yellow flag in a desperate wind.
“Non e’ posssibile;” another man said with a long hiss from a chipped tooth. “La Lombardia is a region, not a ssstore.”
“Cosi ha detto, Mort. They just closed Lazaretto,” Sergio said. All the men leaned heavy into the bar to hear better like the disciples in Da Vinci’s Last Supper. “That’s what Mort told me,” Sergio said.
Sergio said, “A total lockdown. I just talked to him. Lazaretto is closed and they are going into quarantena. We’re next, in my opinion.”
Max was lost in thought, far away, and he wondered how did he do that, and where did he go when this happened. He had been thinking hard but had gotten no answer. Max had gotten nowhere trying to wrap his mind around a country closing, tourism completely shut down in a country dependent on that industry and he had gotten nowhere on Sergio’s question of how he was going to survive if there was a lockdown and no tourists or tours. It is unimaginable Rome without tourists, he had responded.
“You will have to evacuate and return to America. What a shame, too; so early in the season.”
Max had gotten nowhere on any answer about anything he was concerned about because the solutions were out of reach still and he was flying through a deep empty space looking for an answer somewhere in his mind. Hearing the gasps of the regulars stunned that they had closed Lazaretto brought Max out of his concentration. There was a certain jet lag to it, a sort of lost time or a time warp as if his thoughts held their own mass and pulled at the fabric of the universe as a planet or star. He was adrift again in his worries and was startled when Hope walked up to him. Had it been an hour?
“Oh, hi,” he said.
“Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t mean to startle you. You looked like you were in another place.”
“I was. I was in a very different place,” he said.
She said, “Hmm,” and then caught the bartender’s attention. “Ciao Sergio, una pils.”
Sergio began the long pour. Max looked for another bar stool so that Hope could sit with him, but they were all occupied by gossiping and worried patrons, so he got up.
“Please, have a seat. I need to stand anyway.”
“Are you sure,” she said. “I am pretty tired. Been on my feet running all day. Had a tour earlier, my last one.”
“How do you feel?” Max finally asked once Hope had settled. Sergio placed her beer before her.
“Lousy,” she said. “Very lousy.”
Lousy, that was the word, Max thought. Everybody is feeling lousy and scared.
“I’m sorry to hear about your company; if it’s true.”
“Yes,” she said, “it’s true.”
She sipped her beer and rearranged her things so they weren’t in the way. Max watched Hope and wondered how she felt about leaving Italy. He wasn’t sure if she was sorry or happy or probably a little of both; but mainly, he thought, she must be relieved. It’s not easy making a living in Italy. Especially as a foreigner. Especially as a female and a foreigner. Italy wasn’t a friendly place to make money. Earning a living is a battlefield in Italy. You have to fight on all fronts. Your main enemy is the government officials with boosted egos high on their power to interpret the laws as they see fit for themselves, the power to be paid to do the bidding of a cousin or a competitor and too often used as weapons against businesses for another’s gain and their own gains, an income made through a battle of attrition every day. And then if you were a foreigner and then a woman where you are dismissed, and Hope, a smart, educated, American woman who never got the lead roll no matter how innovative because the cultural moats in Italy are insurmountable and Max wondered, would quarantining the country shake things up. He was back in his head again, thinking too much and he was far away, and he became conscious of it and stopped. He looked at Hope, but she was somewhere else, somewhere maybe safe, or someplace she could not escape. And she stayed there for a long time before she came back to the bar and to Max and their last beers in Italy in this bar without Sergio.
Bryan Jansing is a pioneer of Flash Fiction whose works include, “Like Clumps of Dried Dirt,” “Bridge Party,” and “A Number on Reality,” in Fast Forward Vol. 3, The Mix Tape (2010), which was the finalist for the Colorado Book Awards. He was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2019. He has written for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. His book Italy: Beer Country is the first book about the Italian craft beer movement. Bryan Jansing currently lives and writes in Rome, Italy. More @BryanJansing