Every day, I come and sit somewhere in the square, I have made it a rule of my life here. It’s a code of behaviour, a defence against madness, a landmark in the strangeness of what I am living through, a shield against sorrow. In the evening, I await nightfall and the sky that reddens like eyes that slowly close. The sun sinks behind the dome, and I follow its progress. I watch for an hour, sometimes two, until darkness is complete. Photographers set up their tripods, children run circles around the obelisk as their parents discuss family matters, nuns cross the square, chatting away, young women in minidresses hurry off to meet a lover. Sometimes their high heels gets caught in the paving stones.
Priests move across the square in their long black cassocks and Roman collars. Some look like they have just arrived from the countryside, others from an Armani boutique. I search for happiness on their faces. In silence I question them: do they know, by any chance, in which part of the body love lies?
The Greeks believed that health was the result of the union of contrary forces, when mutual love replaced conflict between opposing elements. They also said that the proof we love another person is when he sees us throw down our weapons at his feet, and we love him still.
This is the Italy of elegant businessmen at the Colosseum, and old prostitutes sitting by the edge of the road. It is the Italy of our first night, of our lives entwined. I came to separate them one strand at a time, and cut each of the threads that binds me to you, take away everything I gave you, and that you spoiled. Like a soldier killed by friendly fire, because his fellows let their impulses take over and did not check to see who the target was. Like a bold sapper who moves too quickly toward the mine to be neutralized, his tread heavy, forgetting he could blow up his comrades. Everything you sabotaged, everything you were too careless to protect and that I continued giving you, because I believed that everything depended on me, and that my faith in our love could be strong enough for both of us.
Now I ask myself: my faith in what?
I keep watch, I wait, I suspect, I scrutinize, I check, I spy. I have come to seek refuge here, and from afar, from deep in my hiding place, I anticipate what you will do next, how you will move forward, how your guns will sound, even if I can’t predict when and how it will all take place, and what part of my being will be targeted. I don’t know if I should run away as far as possible, or throw myself on the ground and play dead.
The landscape of Rome is a tapestry of ancient colonnades melting into today’s concrete.
Modern Rome remembers its antique face, when death could come calling at any moment, when everything could change in an instant. A misstep, a flare-up, a sideways glance, and fists were raised, razor-sharp weapons ready to thrust into flesh with lightning speed. To take someone’s life, or lose your own, in the arena, a circus whose seats were filled with gods with human faces.
The Romans jabbed metal into bellies, into flanks, into the heart, they decapitated and displayed the head on the end of a lance, put it on public view. The condemned were torn apart in the arena to teach a lesson. Death came from up close and you could see the other one’s eyes, touch his skin, smell the stink of his sweat, you could taste the tears and blood and hear the cries for mercy and the screams, the sound flesh makes when it is torn asunder.
Ancient Rome was a world of paradox and reversal. The human element was fallible, unpredictable. In the evening, in the Forum, when the public settled in to watch the dramas that had been played out during the day, the theatre was a reminder not to forget that in life, anything could happen. It was the same for you, everything could change in an instant, things had a way of turning on their heads with lightning speed. I had to be on the alert to survive and slip around you, two tightrope walkers.
I write in the city’s sounds, the rustling of dry leaves against terracotta tiles, the honking of horns and furious sirens, the cries of enormous seagulls that land on the roof and size me up out of the corners of their eyes. I wonder who is living inside them, and who lives inside the little lizards that cling to the white stucco, dragging their bellies over the wall of cactus and freezing every time my chair makes a sound. I wonder why you don’t like cacti. Is it because of their thorns or their toughness, or because of their resilience, the fact that they flower against all odds?
One afternoon, not long after we first met, sitting on the curb in the summer’s hot sun, I got a message from you. You were in Prague, you said you were with a couple of friends, the woman was pregnant, they were very much in love. You were thinking of me, you wrote, you missed me, and at the end of your message you asked, “What door did you use to come into me?” Now I know that you never gave me the key.
To escape from you, to flee this fantasy, this haunting, rid myself of your image, have it extirpated, amputated through trepanning or lobotomy, let the pain cease, let alcohol or drugs wipe it away, be brainwashed so that once and for all I can accept that loving you was going to drive me mad.
When I was very young I had a lover who was ten years older than I was. We worked in the same concert hall, I was an usher and Jules was a production assistant, he was married to a set designer, they had children together, a house, a life filled with all kinds of things, including boredom.
One day, on one of the many love letters Jules gave me, scribbled words on scraps of paper, table napkins, postcards, matchbooks, words that recorded our love stolen during intermission, backstage, on the front seat of the car when he brought me home late at night before slipping into bed with the woman he had married, he quoted Lacan’s famous aphorism: “Love is giving what you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.” I said those words to you once; they stood between us like the enigma of the Sphinx . You looked at me in silence.
Jules told me that one Sunday afternoon, as he handed his wife the dictionary she had asked for, it dropped between them and fell to the floor, the spine broken, open to the word “marriage.” They both laughed at the coincidence. A few months later, they were divorced.
One night, after you left, I had a dream. We were sleeping in different rooms. Morning came, I was thinking of you, I thought of making love with you, but instead of going into your room and your bed I stayed alone in mine, in my withdrawal. Then, in half-sleep, I heard you moving through the apartment and coming closer to my room. You sat down next to my body curled under the sheets. You wanted to talk to me, talk to me again, this time about Shakespeare. You asked me questions but I wouldn’t answer. My eyes were closed. I reached out my arms and pulled you toward me. I was insistent, to stop your flow of words, I sat up and brought my mouth to yours to kiss you and bring you closer. You split in two: the man I was kissing separated from the man who went on with his discourse about a subject that, when I awoke, I had no memory of.
In the dream as in life, you smothered me with statements, maxims, sayings, and half-truths. You drowned me in words.
You told me once that a person who has disappeared from our lives continues, even from a distance, to be in touch with our emotions, and that whatever we feel for this person, he feels for us too. You said that to console me, or reassure yourself, so you could go on thinking that you never lost anything or anyone unless you decided to. You rejected surgical separations that produced only memories and silence. You wanted to dictate even the way we broke up. You wouldn’t let me cut off our connection, you insisted we move into the friendship stage immediately, since it would absolve you of guilt, the pain you caused swept aside, invisible, as if hatred, resentment, and the feeling of rejection could be avoided, as if we could move smoothly from the heat of love to calm accord, let me, with a final tender caress, cover your steps as you moved away.
I don’t know if it was just the two of us, you and I, or if a whole battalion followed you as in the story of the Trojan horse. In whose name were you speaking? What were you defending? What country, whose borders were threatened? When you talked I never knew whether the words were yours or someone else’
s, mine or yours, in that permanent state of confusion in which you operated. Nothing was clear or solid. You saw me like a mirror, I became your reflection.
Can you guess what I’m doing now? When I let my tears flow, do your cheeks glisten? And if I make myself come to keep from dying completely, do you take pleasure with me? On your finger, did you feel the moment when I took off the gold wedding band? Did you know I had taken it off, then put it back on in a moment of hope, then taken it off once more and hidden it deep in my bedroom closet? When you fall asleep, do you see my eyes? If you died, would you see our life together passing before you, the life, you wrote me once I had left you, that you really had chosen, the life you suddenly saw in a new way because I had unplugged you from me, and when I did that your desire resuscitated, out of fear of losing me or the shame of being left, or out of anger because you could not dictate how our story ended.
In my dreams, I leave you over and over. My sleep keeps watch, and when I awake, I lower my shield. I don’t know if I’m writing to end our love or make it last, bring it to life or embalm it.
By night, Rome changes its face, it turns into discreet fires and long shadows. Details disappear. Faded is the light of day that sharpens edges and opens streets like a territory to be discovered, so many images to be absorbed. By night, Rome puts on a chasuble, the long veil of a Madonna in mourning. The vault of the sky descends upon the earth, streetlamps are like fireflies winking in the night. The eyes seek out what they must find, but all is not given, the city is like a body slowly revealing itself, we discover it like a blind man’s caress, in slow steps. The sweep of a hand, laughter, languor, Rome takes on new life as I watch, my eyes comforted by darkness, a gentle night. I am troubled by everything daylight hid from me. Wound in black, the city seems to become what it was in antiquity, stories run down the alleys, enter through secret doors, slip down well concealed tunnels, ghosts begin to breathe again. The city becomes the place where Dante’s errant souls wait, who have asked nothing from God or anyone else, the place where present and past are married.
When the pain gets too intense, I try the therapy of exhaustion. I walk for hours through the Centro Storico, through Trastevere, the old Jewish ghetto, I lose myself in the old streets. I keep returning to Via dei Coronari, I dream of buying things I can’t possibly afford from the shop windows on Via del Babuino, I order a coffee on the Piazza del Popolo and share my croissant with a very cheeky sparrow that has landed on my table. Often I move through the streets blindly. I let my steps carry me forward, moved by people who brush by me, the cloak of the sun wraps around my body. Then, some unknown signal awakens me, I come back to reality and lift my eyes to look.
Sometimes, when beauty strikes, I don’t know how to take it in. It is heavy and dense, it takes up all the space, and I understand why tourists put a lens between the world and the gaze they cast upon it. They want to protect themselves. Beauty can be intolerable, it can turn the world into an impossible place, because if you lose it after you’ve found it, what remains?
During these long walks, I try to escape myself. Walk, more and more, faster and further, like centrifugal-force machines that scientists use to separate wheat from chaff. I leave behind the four walls of my mind and surrender to the city’s heat. I am in an open-air monastery, and I pray to be given the faith I need to cross the desert.
Drink a glass of Prosecco. Meet a very thin and very tall Dutchman who drags me through the churches of Rome at night to see the Caravaggios that you can view if you slip some coins in a slot, tease him by asking if he’s the Flying Dutchman. Spend hours on St. Peter’s Square looking at the crowd, the police with their ears fastened to their cellphones, the priests walking with a regal gait, lovers entwined. Walk along the banks of the Tiber. Gaze at the city from the Pincio Gardens. Try to roll my r’s without getting it right. Eat a plate of carbonara with plenty of black pepper. Pull off the leaves of fried artichokes. Go to Arsenale and fall in love with an anthracite silk dress. Listen to the Dutch guide tell me about the Pope and Mussolini. Eat a raspberry-and-chocolate-flavoured gelato. Write on the rooftop deck until late in the evening. Watch Rome, the series, then fall asleep and dream that I’m caressing Titus Pullo. Get woken up by the traffic at six in the morning. Write on the deck before it gets too hot. Wave to the owner who never leaves her place except to do the shopping and hang her clothes out to dry. Go down six floors without an elevator. Wait for the pleasure of taking a shower at the end of the day. Go out in the burning heat. Read Ovid’s The Art of Love. Think about you and try not to anymore, and if I don’t succeed, take off running. Walk down Borgo Pio and pretend not to look like a tourist. Scream silently because I have been taken prisoner by a crowd moving like a tide of mud through the Vatican museums. Order an iced cappuccino at Castroni’s as consolation. Buy a jean skirt for five euros in the street from a Pakistani vendor, and spot him again when I go by late that evening as he’s packing up his wares and folding up his tent, tables, and boxes and stowing them in the back of a white truck. Wake up, make coffee, spread Nutella on some whole-wheat crackers, eat an extremely juicy peach. Splash myself with water from a public fountain. Regret not being able to make love. Cry on St. Peter’s Square, hoping no one will see me, and hoping that someone will.
When I feel my mind turning to you, I grab it by the neck and push it over to the window so it can see the dome against the sky behind the buildings and the tall umbrella pines. My eyes settle on the orange glow of the apartment block across the way. The shutters are open, and I see a young family getting ready for dinner. Their neighbour, an old woman, steps out to see whether the heat has fallen and it’s safe for her to go out. I lean out the window and six floors down I see cars and people moving slowly through the heat of Via Candia. I return to the deck and the forest of TV antennas that look like a contemporary art installation. I sit down and listen to the noise that plates make in the building’s inner courtyard, then go on writing.
In the opening of a metal pipe, a bee is building its house. Every morning, as I watch from the table, it makes countless trips between the flowers and the pipe. I see it cross the deck, gather a load, and return with its feet heavy with yellow moss that I imagine it will push into the pipe to build its nest. If I get in its way, it politely flies around me and continues its work. I would like to be an ant and slip into the pipe to see what is going on there. I would like to be another bee so this one would hold me in its embrace and rock me to sleep.
You made your nest in me. You opened your bags, and out jumped snakes and cockroaches, mermaids, jellyfish, a dragon, and a firebird, the hell of the Garden of Earthly Delights. Little by little, they took up residence. At night they moved through the house, they made themselves at home. Sometimes, in the morning, they would lie low, dispersed by dawn light. Then they would come creeping back, emboldened by nightfall. They recovered their lost ground, moving forward stealthily, pitilessly occupying the territory.
I was the house you inhabited. I knew every inch of it except the narrow space you occupied, that dark room with the windows bolted shut where you crouched, head lowered, knees against your chest like a child who’s been punished. That casket where you lay so alone, I stood before it hoping one day that the cover would open and like Lazarus or Raskolnikov, you would resuscitate or, finally, that you might be born.
You told me the story of a soldier who returned to Leningrad, from the front. On the way back home, he saw corpses, dead bodies on the ground, the victims of hunger, horses that had been put out of their misery, looted farms. In front of his house, his wife was waiting. She was well dressed, her hair freshly coiffed, her lips reddened. She spotted him and rushed to his side, gathered him in her arms, covered his face with kisses, and promised she would never let him out of her sight. He was dirty, thin, he smelled bad. She didn’t notice that something in his eyes had changed.
The soldier dropped his pack on the ground and looked around. She took his hand and led hi
m into the kitchen. She had set the table. A chicken, potatoes, beets, cabbage—she had made a feast for him. He stared and said nothing. Then a veil of deep misery fell across his face like a mask. His wife was invisible to him. Ill at ease, she asked him, “What’s wrong?”
There were no words for the look in his eyes. He didn’t understand where she had found all this life, whom she had taken it from, and what she had traded to get it. He picked up his gun and aimed at her. He fired once twice three times until the house was empty, just like him.
You lived in a dark room in the middle of an abandoned house where ghosts swept past, beings that had not been freed by those they had left. In this place, torment buzzed, it was a house built on a torrent. You lived alone in the dark room I could not enter. I called to you from where I stood, a space that was neither your dwelling nor mine, a kind of decompression chamber, the departure lounge of an airport, the waiting room in a medical clinic. I answered your calls and your demands. I kept the tension in the line that bound us. I refused to leave the garden and turn my back on you.
Each time my words came to knock on the door of that house, the dragon would rush out, ready to breathe fire and keep me from coming closer. Brambles began to grow against the walls, and moats were dug all around. You practised provocation. You flew into a rage because I would not obey the laws of your kingdom. Your words rattled like a hail of machine-gun fire, they tightened their ranks, their shields raised one next to the other in a square formation, like a fortress. I sought a way in, I set my syntax against yours, I would not resign and accept the unfair, senseless things you said. But your rage did not lessen. I pulled you near and you resisted until finally I retreated in exhaustion. Then it started over one more time, I left once again for the front. It was a strange reversal: I was the knight and you the damsel, prisoner of the tower, but when I reached the top, you refused to budge. Instead of following me, you preferred your own dreams as if they were reality.
The Last Bullet Is for You Page 4