trini_naenae
Glorious Camp
Evening arranges itself slowly around the shoulders of the old city, snug and comfortable as a bespoke coat. At the little tables in the small cafes the audience of the boulevard begins the slow, measured transition from espresso to caffè corretto. The progression is as gradual and inevitable as the sunset. It is the hour in which the aging boulevardier returns.
In his youth he owned these streets. He flirted with the fine young women, all smiles and cigarettes, wildly attired as if dressed by delirious milliner-poets. He flattered the worldy older women, befurred and coifed, gilded and haughty. In those days he lived for the evenings, when the streets filled with cabmen smoking stubby cigarillos beneath lowered caps, with English tourists beginning to wonder if they were lost, with the occasional mustachioed Carabinieri delicately turning his head from all but the most egregious offenses, with laborers smelling of bad cologne, with idlers and exiles and knaves and buffoons. And with the dignified old faces of aging boulevardiers whose time had come and gone, though they had remained.
In his heart he knows. He knows he has become one of them, the old men who dress too young, who exchange trifles with tourist girls who giggle and flirt but never turn and look back at him over their shoulder, who hold too long to their dreams and keep a small, sad, never-opened bottle of Viagra in their coat pocket. He knows, and he knows he belongs there still, as surely as all the others. He is part of the street, part of the city, and without him and those like him, the night would not be complete.
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