by Nino Ricci
The ruins were at the town’s outskirts, along a slope of craggy hillside dotted with gnarled crabapple and olive trees. A gravelled path led down to them from the roadway. We had to sign a register at a tiny gatehouse that an old man in a rumpled suit and tie presided over.
“Watch that your wife doesn’t slip on the stones on the way down,” he said.
The path continued for quite a distance before we rounded a hill and the ruins finally appeared before us on a small plateau. Great squares of white stone formed the foundation of what seemed to have been a temple; spread out around it were the low, rectangular remains of smaller, more minor buildings, their bits of wall showing the same stone and rubble construction as the houses of Valle del Sole. There was a feel of abandonment to the place as if someone had begun work here and then lost interest, a few fenced-off areas that showed the tentative beginnings of new excavations overgrown now with weeds. Littered throughout the site were massive blocks of cut stone, great giant-sized bits of rubble spread out in a seemingly random dispersal as if whatever great form had once existed here was gradually reverting over the years to a state of perfect, utter disorder.
“They keep hoping the tourists will come,” Luisa said. “But who ever sees tourists here in the middle of nowhere?”
Beyond the temple, hidden from view until we were actually upon it, a small amphitheatre lay sheltered at the bottom of a grassy hollow. It was a surprise after the meagre offerings of the rest of the site, its half-dozen rows of stone benches sitting so placid and still, so human in their dimensions, they seemed to be awaiting an audience that must arrive at any moment. The whole construction was an odd mix of delicacy and brawn, a retaining wall along the edge of the upper rows built up of huge, uneven blocks pieced together without mortar, but then the ends of the bottom rows graced with carvings of subtle, griffin-like figures and the seats themselves forming a perfect symmetry of smooth, rounded slabs of cut stone. The seats had been gently contoured to accommodate the curve of a back, a feature that struck me as unexpectedly tender, that these fierce mountain people had taken that care.
As a child I had hardly known of this place, though I’d lived just across the valley almost in sight of it.
“Do they teach you about these things in school now?” I said.
“Oh, well. This and that. About the Samnites and so on. Because we came down from them.”
We took a seat in one of the front rows. It was like being up against the sky here, against the gods. Beyond where the stage would have been the land fell away toward the valley, gently at first and then more steeply; two thousand years ago one would have sat in this place and gazed out over what might have seemed the whole of the known world. A few hundred people could have been accommodated here, no more – that was what a civilization was, back then, a few hundreds huddled together against the dark watching some scene unfold that might have been simple-minded or trite or more primal, more pure in its pain, than we could imagine.
“So what can you tell me about them?” I said. “About your ancestors?”
Luisa shrugged.
“We beat the Romans once. We had them trapped in a valley but instead of killing them we just made them pass under our swords to show they’d lost and then sent them home. But after, they wanted to wipe us out, because they’d been shamed like that. They came back and wrecked everything, and then when they built their roads they made sure that none of them passed through here so we’d just be left to die out. But we didn’t die, you see? We’re still here.”
I laughed.
“You’re very proud, you Samnites,” I said. “Very tough. I can see that.”
“You, too. Don’t think you’re any different. You’re still one of us.”
There was a sound of wind and beyond us, on the hillside, the trees swayed like bending dancers. But in our sheltered hollow the air remained perfectly calm and still.
“It’s funny,” Luisa said, “but I always thought of your mother whenever they talked about that, about how proud we were. I was just a baby when you left, but that was always how I saw her, from what people said. Una vera Sannita.”
She seemed to be holding the memory of my mother out to me like a gift.
“You would have liked her,” I said. “She wasn’t so different from you.”
We were sitting almost touching. I could feel the heat of her, could smell her country odour of soap and sweat. There was something in her profile that looked suddenly familiar beyond words, the ancestral trace there, the distillation of lineages that went back and back and back.
“I wonder, sometimes, if things had been different,” she said. “If my family had gone. Like you did.”
“But this is your place. You’re at home here.”
“Yes.”
A small despondency had come between us. We both seemed to have felt the moment pass when I ought to have touched her, taken her hand.
“I suppose we should be going,” she said.
The days passed. As if by agreement Luisa began to come by less often; nothing was said, but it was clear that we were taking our leave of each other. I went by Aunt Caterina’s once and walked down to the old homestead again, drawn to the place as if there was something I’d missed, some answer I might still stumble upon. But its ruins seemed as remote now, as unfathomable, as the bits of scattered rubble at Pietrabbondante. I felt a sense of desolation go through me at how lost to time things were, at the irreducible foreignness of this place though I had come from it. The clay bowl that Luisa had repaired sat still intact on its weathered sideboard, a bit of rainwater collected in the bottom of it – in ten, perhaps a hundred years it might be sitting there still, as much an enigma to those who came then as these fallen rafters and stones, the hard, mysterious lives that had gone on here, were to me now.
Just under two weeks had passed since Rita’s departure when I decided to leave the village. I felt no sense of destination, only the impression that my time here had run out. Marta came by to close up the house, turning the water off and bolting up the shutters.
“Don’t expect it to wait here for you another twenty years,” she said.
The day of my departure Luisa and Fabrizio came by to see me off. It occurred to me for the first time that circumstance ought inevitably to have made of them a couple, yet the whole time I had been here I had never once seen them together. Even now, as they stood elbow to elbow to see me off, they seemed connected only through me, though they’d surely known each other all their lives. There was something in this that tore at me, as if we had each of us in our way missed our fates, our chance at happiness.
“Next time I see you it’ll be in America,” Fabrizio said, though I knew it was a trip he would never make.
My second departure from Valle del Sole, twenty years after the first, felt more final and more fatal: there had been the future, at least, to drive off into then, all the unknown, limitless world. It took only a few minutes of driving now for Valle del Sole to disappear from view; and then I was on my own again without destination or hopes, with no place left now to go home.
XXXIII
Rome was half-deserted with the August holidays when I arrived there, restaurants and corner shops closed down, tourists wandering disconcerted from closed door to closed door. I returned my car to the dealer in the Trastevere and took a room for the night at my former hotel. A grizzled and unfriendly older man checked me in; I asked after the young concierge who had been there on my previous stay and was told he’d been let go.
“He was good for nothing, that one,” the man said.
“He seemed nice enough.”
But the man shrugged as if to say he couldn’t help it if I’d let myself be taken in by him.
I was given a room on the second floor, the garbage stench from the back courtyard overpowering in the August heat. For a long time I sat unmoving in the room’s dingy armchair, my two suitcases sitting unopened on the bed. I felt strangely affected, for some reason, by the young concierge
’s dismissal – there had been something so hopeful in him, so innocent, at least as he had seemed to me then. But when I tried to call up an image of him I couldn’t bring it into focus.
I still had my open return for Toronto. But the thought of booking a flight, of tracking the number down for the airline, of dialling it on the tan-coloured phone that sat on my night table, filled me with an infinite exhaustion. It was as if the engine that ran my body, the little mechanism that everything depended on, was slowly grinding to a stop. I could not imagine boarding a plane, traversing an ocean again, stepping off on the other side, all the effort it would take to carry my life so far again, for so little purpose.
Rita and John might have embarked by now or might still be in London trying to arrange a passage. I had not got any details from them, who John’s friend was, where he worked, how I might track them down. I chided myself for letting them go off like that, for letting them get away, though I couldn’t think what else I might have done, whether there was some other resolution I had missed. There was no other resolution; and yet the thought of Rita still on this side of the world, still not yet returned to the fixity of things as they must inevitably be, gave me a sense of last desperate hope.
The light at the balcony door faded as I sat in my chair, to twilight, to dark, though at the top of the deep well of the courtyard there remained a fugitive shimmer of pale evening blue. I went out into the streets to catch this last bit of light but the buildings closed me in, all long and humid shadow, no escape. By the time I came out to the openness of a square the sky had dulled to black and the streetlights had come on. There were some buskers playing old Beatles tunes on the steps of a fountain, Germans, perhaps, or Scandinavians, blond-haired and bandanna-ed, the lyrics coming out with a telltale foreigner’s drawl. Young backpackers had gathered around them, sitting crosslegged on the cobblestones or on the fountain steps – they had the look of a marauding band, scavengers who had filtered into the city after the residents had deserted it. They were smoking and laughing, singing along with the buskers; and yet there seemed no joy in them, only the abandon of nowhere to go.
I walked for some time, finding myself finally in the square off Termini Station. Inside, great swarms were moving about, coming and going; Gypsy women with dirty infants in their arms moved up the lines at the ticket booths, begging alms. The schedule showed a train leaving at midnight for Paris, with a change there for the boat-train to London – it was something, at least, a destination, a way out of Rome, the oppression of its history, its heat. I went back to the hotel and sat in my room, chain-smoking cigarettes to kill the stench from outside. Finally I came to a sort of decision and repacked my bags, putting all my essentials into the smaller one and leaving the larger one behind when I went to check out. The concierge was watching a small black-and-white television when I went down.
“You’re leaving?”
“Yes.”
He shrugged.
“It’s the same to me. Either way you still have to pay for the night.”
The train was already packed by the time I boarded it, only standing room remaining, people crammed into the aisleway leaning out the windows in the heat. I stood pressed up against the curtained door of one of the compartments, my bag between my legs; there was no room for it in the overhead rack, and no room to pull down one of the folding seats that ran along the aisle. The train was late pulling out of the station, ten minutes, fifteen, all of us crammed there in a heat growing more and more unbearable until finally shouts and bellows began to go up all along the length of it; but when half an hour had passed and still we had not moved, the train grew strangely quiet again. Someone fainted up the aisle from me, a young woman, and had to be helped past us onto the platform, the crowd quickly shifting to fill the empty place she had left. Then finally there was a hiss of brakes releasing and the train set off, in an eerie humanity-crowded silence, floating out through ugly train yards into the night-dead outskirts of Rome.
It was not till after Florence that a bit of space opened up in the aisle and it became possible to let down the folding seats or make a place for oneself on the floor. People dozed off as best they could, propped against suitcases or knapsacks, the carriage filled with the breath and sweat smell of sleep. I had claimed my own bit of floor, nodding off from time to time before some jolt of the train awoke me again, each time the same sense of panic rising up in me, the disorientation of not knowing for an instant where I was, where I was headed; though once I’d got my bearings the feeling was worse, the sick hollowness in the pit of my stomach as if it could not matter, after all, where I was, one place was as senseless as any other.
Some time in the middle of the night the train began to falter: I had the impression through my dozing of a constant stopping and starting, the hiss of steam, the shouting of train men from outside. As dawn came on it seemed we had stopped for good: an hour passed, then two, and still we sat stalled. There was not a town in sight, just bits of bush and field; there was a smell of the sea in the air, but no view of it through the windows. People had begun to stir, to stumble out to the toilets, irritable at the delay, at the mess of bodies and limbs to be got through. When we had finally set off again it was only twenty minutes or so before we had stalled once more; and then in this halting way we continued until, some time past noon, the train finally hobbled into Genoa, hours behind schedule. An announcement was made: the train would be cleared here, it would not be continuing onward. On the platform people stood amidst their suitcases and bags looking abandoned, cut adrift, as if we had been cast out like stowaways.
There were no other trains for Paris until the evening. I decided to take a mid-afternoon one for Lyons – it seemed important simply to keep moving, to avoid the vertigo that set in when I stopped, the sense of being at a precipice. On the train I found an empty compartment and settled into one of the window seats, my body aching now with fatigue. An old man in a soiled linen jacket slouched past the doorway, came back to it, stuck his head in.
“C’è posto?”
“Sì.”
A stench came into the compartment as he entered it, of alcohol and days-old sweat. His face was purpled with carbuncles and broken veins, a whole anatomy visible there of drunkenness and nights in the open, of animal want. He huddled into one of the seats near the door, furtive, as if eluding a pursuer.
“È italiano?” he said.
“No. Canadese.”
“Hm.”
And he turned uncomfortably away from me to look out through the compartment door into the aisle.
Other passengers came up the aisle as they boarded, peered into the compartment, caught sight of the old man and continued on. Then a conductor showed up at the door: perhaps someone had alerted him.
“I’ve got my ticket,” the old man said, angry, defensive. “There’s nothing you can do, I’ve got my ticket.”
And with a callused hand he pulled a stub from the pocket of his jacket. The conductor looked it over without a word, seeming to weigh his options for a moment before finally handing the ticket back and moving on. The old man shot a quick glance in my direction as if seeking an ally, then seemed to remember my foreignness and silently turned back to stare into the aisle.
The train set off. The old man pulled out some bread and cheese from an oily paper bag he carried with him and then a bottle of wine, offering them out to me. I declined them but his show of generosity seemed somehow to put him more at ease. He began to talk, just a mumbling patter at first, as if he was talking to himself, but then slowly working up to a greater animation. He kept replaying the scene with the conductor, seeming very pleased with himself at having outwitted him.
“Did you see his face? They can’t do anything to me, I’ve got my ticket. Did you see the way he went off?”
I had opened the window but the stench from him still filled the compartment; it appeared to come up from his belly as he talked, a noxious odour of liquor and rot. He was on his way to some town near Turin whe
re there was a festival, he said – it was good for begging, people felt guilty at a festival when they saw people worse off than themselves.
“It’s no different than anything, being a beggar. Any business. You just have to find the right way to take advantage.”
As he drained his bottle he became more and more garrulous and less and less coherent. I was only half following him, occasionally nodding or mumbling assent but wanting only to sleep, to be left alone. He kept coming back to his little victory over the conductor – it seemed emblematic for him, as if all his life had been this struggle to hold onto the barest human dignity; and yet there was nothing sympathetic about him, nothing that didn’t seem tinged with depravity.
“You know, I killed a man once,” he said. “At the end of the war. It was one of the Fascists – not that I cared about that, it was only to rob him. But you see what I’m saying, I could see the end by then, how things were going. You have to know how to take advantage. No one came after me for that. They were stringing the Fascists up in the square by then.”
I felt sick. I took my bag down from the luggage rack and left the compartment, though the old man hardly seemed to notice my going. I went through to the next carriage to get away from him and found an empty seat in one of the smoking compartments; but I could still smell his stench, could taste it in my throat. I felt contaminated somehow by my contact with him: my body was dirty like his, smelled of days-old sweat, the others in the compartment seeming to shrink away from me as I came in. I tried to sleep but couldn’t get the old man’s image out of my head, that dull gleam in his eye that seemed just brute, selfish need, the absence there of any humanness or perhaps its essence, what we were when stripped down to our barest selves.