by Joanna Walsh
No, wait a minute, I was wrong: Breton said ‘will be’ – ‘beauty will be convulsive, or it will not be.’ It’s a prediction, not an evaluation.
I’m looking for the pattern that produces the convulsion, still and moving like the jazz hop-skip of the icing hotels and building sites along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice: pink – blue – gap – peach – white – gap, like the rhythm of the sun and shadow between the billboards along the track – bright – dark – gap – bright – gap – gap. Is beauty the is or the isn’t, or is it the rhythm of the two? Is it the pattern or its disruption, or is beauty recognising the pattern then disrupting it, or trying to? Sometimes I think I can see a pattern but then I’m not sure it means anything. Then I remember the Buddhist’s card, and I want the card to mean something to me, or I want it to mean nothing and for that to mean something. Love – constant revolution, pure disruption – can never be stilled. I’m not sure that love can be beautiful.
Out of the window now, the rhythm of the landscape has changed: more buildings, fewer gaps. We’re rattling through the suburbs of Rome. In the meantime, I’ve worked out some rules of the game for my photos:
• Avoid: museums, galleries, churches, tourist spots.
• Avoid photographing anything too ‘typical’ of the country.
• Avoid anything ‘beautiful’.
• (Try not to operate these rules too consciously.)
I take some shots: wires crossing above the crossed train tracks. The woman sitting opposite gets up to pull her case down from the rack. She’s in her fifties, early sixties perhaps, well-dressed, wearing no make-up. I can see age spots and tiny wrinkles. Bare skin is daring; at her age, even more so. Why would she expose herself like this? Because she looks like she’s brave enough not to be trying, she is beautiful. She takes a small bag from her case, and from it a tiny mirrored compact. She opens it and begins to apply foundation with a sponge until her skin is uniform in texture and unnaturally peachy in colour. I know that if I got close to her it would no longer smell or feel like skin – it would smell like talcum and feel like ultrasuede, and that if I kissed her, I wouldn’t be kissing her, and that particles of colour would stay on my lips when I pulled away.
She takes out a concealer pencil. As we pull into Rome Termini station, she slowly erases the last traces of herself.
I feel in my pocket for the Buddhist’s card. It’s not there.
5 Rome/Living
27th April
I’m sitting in the ruin of – what? It might be someone’s living room. The knee-high walls are laid out like the floor-plan of a house, only not in blue pencil but in broken stone teeth. It’s not in the Forum – I’m avoiding monuments – it’s just one of those pieces of ancient Rome that cracks through the concrete of the present day like a bad memory, a way in for grass, for all kinds of untidy thoughts. I’m outside Rome’s central station which, like Milan’s, is shrouded for repairs in a coy dressing tent paler than its concrete. The Milan train delivered me straight to the rocky heart of the city, if you’d call it a heart. Rome’s heart probably is the Forum, hollow and dusty as a dead beetle’s carapace. The soft, living parts of the city, the parts that pulse, that beat, are built around its internal exoskeleton.
I have never known what to do in living rooms. When I get back I suppose I’ll have one – that’s how most accommodation is laid out. What should I do there? Sit in those chairs I never sat in? Watch the telly, which I don’t much? Live, I suppose.
A ruin is nothing but half a sentence. Something about it invites completion, by guesswork or interpretation. Stones are like words – they have so many uses, the new use always knocking the old away, making it impossible to read how things once were – but it’s not unusual to come across fissures in the street through to previous meanings. Some of them are right out in the open and I can use them like I am now, to rest my luggage, waiting for a bus outside the central station, or as a picnic table, or a seat to stop for a cigarette. These stones are not in museums; I don’t have to pay an entrance fee to think about them and my rules permit me to wander amongst them, looking for nothing, straining for no significance. Others have fences which, like a velvet rope in an art gallery, make them into something meaningful, and these are the ones I look and look at, and wonder what they signify, as the fences tell me there must be some kind of story behind them.
I’m not sure when a house becomes a ruin. It’s not always to do with crumbling. Some houses that look wrecked are still inhabited, others are unliveable. In Rome it’s hard to tell what’s derelict. Pagan stones are walled into Christian churches, Renaissance palaces built to resemble ancient monuments that were, themselves, memorials – for wars, for ancestors killed in battle. Architectural styles nod to each other across the streets. In an Empire most famous for falling, so much of Rome is a memorial to a memorial. Everywhere I look there are buildings decorated with flower vases that resemble funeral urns, and funeral urns that look like flower vases, until they hardly seem like anything sad any more.
Here I am in Rome. Again.
Rome is a place you return to. You throw a coin in a fountain in a square, which the fountain almost fills, and which is filled, for the remaining part, with people taking photographs of the fountain. If you do this you will return, they say, but they do not tell you why you would want to. The first time I visited Rome I was with my husband, before we were married, and we came back a second time, a few years later. Not that returning was easy. There are so many Roman names for alleys, for tiny dead-end streets: stradina, viuzza, vicolo. The vicolos and stradinas cross the full-size stradas and vias, which are full of the noise and dust of vehicles going elsewhere. The vicolos still belong to the pedestrians but, when we took them in preference to the stradas, we found they did not take us anywhere, not, at least, in the direction we thought we were going, towards the fountain that meant we would return to Rome, which is at the centre of a knot of these little streets, and which we failed to find the first time and, on returning, failed to find again.
Husband, hus-band, a band, a tie, rubbery, elastic. Pull it away and it snaps back tight. I always hated the word, I never used it.
I catch a bus to my hostel. In its living room, dusty with artificial flowers, which is also Reception, the manager watches TV. Living in public, he looks like some kind of performance art, set behind a velvet rope so no one else ever sits there. My room’s not ready so I drop my bags and go for a walk.
As I walk the streets I walked with the man I was married to, which I will not now walk with you, I’m unsure what time zone I’m in. I feel transparent, a ghost performing the same action over and over, an action remembered from past life, with no meaning in the present. Habitual, habit, inhabit. Action, perform, ghosts, I know what they do, intimately, but what purpose do they serve: what are ghosts for?
Referring to what I must have ceased to be in order to be who I am.
Breton, Nadja
I don’t know if there are ghosts in Rome. There are ghosts in London but not in Paris, and in London there are fewer than in the rest of England. Ghosts are a rural affair. A ghost is a story in the landscape. Cities have monuments and ruins to tell their citizens the time. Perhaps cities need no ghosts.
Tell me who you haunt, and I’ll tell you who you are: I was walking through an old city with you one time. It wasn’t Rome and, although you had invited me to walk there with you, you acted as though you were trying to get rid of me, but I continued to shadow you as I didn’t yet know you were beginning to leave me. That’s when you told me I seemed haunted. By what? You didn’t explain and, because there was something in the way you said it I wasn’t prepared for, I didn’t question you further. In any case, it seemed appropriate. Love is always coming up against ghosts: till death us do part, says the husband; I shall but love thee better after death, says the lover, though I’m never sure whether she’s talking about her own death, or her beloved’s.
Ghosts, in French, are revenants/returner
s. Returning to Rome I’m no longer haunted, I’m the haunter, caught in one place between past and the might-have-been. The streets slant at twenty, thirty degrees but the stones, the windowsills remain on the level. As I climb the pavements, to someone on the interior it must look like I’m coming up from the cellar (have you ever seen that old music-hall gag where someone outside of the window sags at the knees then straightens, pretending to ascend, step after step?). I’ve spent a long time dead but now I’m back, and I can tell you all about what it’s like to be under the ground.
But this is the Pantheon – here it is again! I hardly know how but – here I am, approaching by the same vicolo as when I stayed here years ago, married. Was I heading here without knowing it? Here’s the shop where we bought biscotti! Even the coffee bar on the corner of the Piazza della Rotonda has outlasted my marriage. This triumph of stones is cheering. The afternoon heats up. Cafés cling to the sides of the square where pools of shade evaporate. I go into the Pantheon, just because I did when I was here before.
There are two domes in Rome, one pagan and one Christian, and they’re always measured up against each other. Two kinds of life, mutually exclusive, as polarised as ‘married’ and ‘single’: that’s not much of a choice. The dome of Saint Peter’s, designed in imitation of the pagan Pantheon, was to be bigger, better but, after several generations of failure, Michelangelo was brought in to redraw the plans. Several generations. Well, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Even now, hovering between Classical and Baroque, Saint Peter’s is oval, not a perfect sphere. Planned to need less support than the Pantheon, its dome was designed to look lighter, but it never worked as a self-supporting structure. The egg cracked and now it’s bound with chains. The Pantheon’s held up by a nothing; it’s built around an oculus, a hole in the ceiling’s centre that takes the lean of its walls.
That classical portico on the Pantheon, though, genteel as a uPVC conservatory, a slap on the back of a suburban semi – can it be original? It is. The temple to ‘all the gods’ is a Roman oddity, being structurally unaltered though, inside, the old gods are scrubbed clean off, their gilded statues melted from the roof. The circle of the pagan temple has been squared, by an altar into a Christian one, but it feels neither one thing nor the other. A pantheon today means a burial place for celebs, like the church in Paris they call the Tall Men Hotel*, and that’s what it’s used for; the kings of a united Italy thrown about, forgotten in corners, an uneasy Christian stamp on their secular triumph.
*Hôtel des Grands Hommes, aka the Pantheon, Paris
The ancient Romans didn’t believe in gods, not unless they were useful enough to win them wars, or sex, or food. They knew exactly what their gods were for, down to the gods of door hinges, of window frames. It is hard to believe the Romans didn’t worship the oculus, the eye in the ceiling, its blankness, its temperamental gaze, the way it sees and is seen though, the way it casts an uncertain light. It looks like god. It looks so simple and honest that painters all over Rome have let fake oculi into the closed domes of Catholic churches. The skies they painted were always blue, sometimes with decorative puffs of cloud, but the oculus of the Pantheon throws down a white light that is frightening as well as beautiful, and it is often pale and unresponsive, and answers you with a question, and sometimes it lets in rain or, very occasionally, snow.
Is it possible to believe we could have a god without making use of him?
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Maybe it’s because I can see something that looks like god (or because it can see me) but I want to pray. It’s not because I want to believe – or because I want anything at all. At school I learnt to repeat the formula, but they never told me what praying was for, and I couldn’t frame the question. Birthday-candle wishes seemed irreverent, praying for unknown third parties, pious fakery, and I had no urgencies pressing enough to make a direct request anything more than hogging the line. Once my school asked me to attend a service at a real church so, aged fourteen, I put on a black sweater and a black skirt, which I thought sober, and a red felt hat, and red lace fingerless gloves and tights, which I considered smart as anything worn to church on the telly, the only place outside school I had ever seen anybody pray. I did not think I looked odd, I only thought that the rest of the congregation hadn’t made an effort worthy of the situation. And that’s when I got it, what praying is: it’s a kind of performance.
Praying is another kind of telling to someone not there, and that makes it a bit like a love letter, and a bit like writing, and I believe in the last two, but not the first. Surely I shouldn’t feel the need to pray if I write, wouldn’t need to write if I prayed. In the Pantheon, with the old gods gone and the new never really in residence, under the eye of the roof, where there’s nowhere to sit as there is in an English church, praying is one place words seem redundant. You have to have words – Our Father, or whatever – but you don’t have to make them say anything new. I’m sick of the sound of my own voice anyhow, the voice I’ve travelled with so carefully, avoiding some voices – for instance, the one that seems to know too much, the one that uses long words, and also the one that uses short words but has long words up its sleeve all the time. Right now I don’t want to hear myself speak, I just want to repeat a formula. It calms my mind, it keeps me together, allows me to sit in a still place, and not think about words. Prayer is its own answer.
As I leave in the blink of daylight, two Dutch, or German girls thrust a phone at me, ask me to photograph them in front of the portico where fancy-dressed dead Centurions pose with tourists (for a fee), lending them plastic swords and helmets. I am anxious about the number of people taking photographs of the Pantheon, each going home with a version of the same image. How will they recognise themselves in the one standing, smiling, amongst so many, after the years have twisted them into ghosts of their own image? See that woman who folds her flat body into the angles of the portico? She has the hair of a teenager, shinier, and a slim body but, when she turns, a 60-year-old smoker’s face, hairless eyebrows drawn in over beautiful clear eyes, bagged, beneath, with folds. But her lips are clearly delineated, above an unlined, neat chin. Has she had ‘work done’, like Rome, in one area of her structure, but not another? Here in the Piazza della Rotonda, like everywhere else, it’s the older women I see first. I think I’m searching in them for a sign of what I might become. I was doing this aged fifteen and I haven’t found it yet. The older women on the streets don’t look like the thin, tan women on the billboards I saw from the train, or like the solid, white women who have held up Roman porticos for so many years without a sigh. Because they are not answered in the architecture I know that the women walking through the square are not real women – or maybe they are real women, but the fake women on the statues and the billboards are more important. In any case I look at them slyly, knowing there’s something shameful in my looking. I’m trying to catch something I recognise – the girl in the woman, how she got there, her story – but I’m also looking for something more, the possibility of a way of being. Maybe I’ll only recognise it when it’s my turn. When I was twenty I thought I saw her once, one who might have fitted the bill: a woman walking through the shopping centre in my concrete new town, which, then, was all I knew of pillars and porticos. She wore plum-coloured stockings that shone, that were unusual enough to have been chosen with care, and for the woman’s own pleasure, and that, I could tell, were expensive. Above the stockings, the woman had a neat, shiny head of cropped hair, so unlike the filigree birds’ nests the older women I knew prepared so carefully every morning, using electrical devices. If, one day, I could become the woman in the shiny stockings, I thought, life might not have been in vain.
I am so vain.
The woman in the plum-coloured stockings was alone, and I look only at the older women who are alone. I turn away from the women in couples; they seem to me, somehow, subtracted.
When I was in Rome with the man I was married to, I used to watch co
uples take their packed lunches out of each other’s backpacks, straighten folds in maps the other held, adjust each other’s hats, camera straps, find tickets in each other’s pockets. Whenever we did these things, I didn’t trust either of us to get it right so I kept glancing at other couples to see. Then marriage looked like forgiveness or, no, not forgiveness but acknowledgement, acceptance – of age, or death, or change, or of staying the same. I was always looking for clues as to how I should be married, and I looked both to real people, and to ones in books and in films. What did I want to ask of them: At what age is marriage best? Is it happiest to be long or freshly married? Are marriages successful because couples married young, or old; because their relationship is innocent, or worldly? How much should the married see of one another, how strongly are they allowed to disagree with each other’s opinions? How, in all these things, is marriage different from being in love? I looked at the couples who looked like they had good marriages, and was pleased when theirs looked a little like ours, and at the couples who looked like they had bad marriages, and took comfort if ours seemed better. Then I felt bad, because to look at all was to question my own marriage. The tedious, repetitious married: why do I feel I can learn nothing from them? A successful marriage dissolves into silence. Something crumbles in the face of the word.