The Cusanus Game

  “You are too kind, Your Eminence. I am honored by your offer.”

  “You would then have to tell me about the Lullian art, if it has been taught to you in Paris.”

  “It will be my pleasure, Your Eminence.”

  The groom led the animals by the reins up the dock, held the stirrup, and helped the Cusan mount. The cardinal held up the tied-up scroll with the letters.

  “Thank you!” he called to the scholar, who had shouldered his knapsack. “God bless you.”

  “Farewell, Your Eminence.”

  “We set off,” the cardinal commanded, taking the reins. “I want to be in Heisterbach with the Cistercians for sext and in Andernach for vespers. The day is short, and I hate journeying in the dark.”

  The groom nodded, leaped into the saddle, and fastened together the reins of the pack animals. Then they rode off, leaving behind the voices of the children ringing out in the cool morning air.

  A couple of geese flew low over the reeds along the river. The heavy, rhythmic beat of their wings sounded like the lusty moans of two lovers. The groom turned his face away and grinned.

  VI

  In Vincoli

  This game, I say, signifies the movement of our soul from its kingdom to the kingdom of life, in which there is rest and eternal happiness. In its center presides Jesus Christ, our king and the giver of life. Since he was similar to us, he moved the sphere of his person so that it came to rest in the middle of life, leaving us an example so that we would do as he had done and our sphere would follow his, although it is impossible for another sphere to reach its resting place in the same center of life where the sphere of Christ rests. For there is within the circle an infinity of places and abodes.

  NICOLAUS CUSANUS

  The lecture had been canceled. I had an hour and strolled across the piazza in front of San Pietro in Vincoli. For the first time I realized that the old church looked more like a market hall with several of its gates closed on nonshopping days. Only with difficulty could the portal be made out in the shadow of the portico. I walked around the northern side of the church; from behind the building looked even more odd: an architectural jumble of alterations and additions, so that you could scarcely make out the apse. An old, rounded brick wall rose to half the height of the main building and was crowned with a pitched roof. A murky, makeshift window was installed in it. It could just as well have been a stair tower or the silo of an old storehouse. Over many centuries, the whole complex seemed to have surrounded itself with armor like a mutant crustacean. Into the grooves and hollows of this armor had grown metal rain gutters and water conduits, plastic drainpipes as well as a chaotic network of power lines, lightning conductors, and antenna wires—like forgotten drains and sensors on a corpse after a failed surgery. Dead vines hung down like rotten bandaging.

  I went back and turned the corner onto Via Eudossiana, where a mobile kiosk offered ice cream and drinks to students and tourists in the summer. On that day too it stood in its spot, but business was bad. Most of the departments of the university next door had been dissolved. The tourists didn’t come. Only rarely did a small group of Chinese or Japanese visitors stray there to admire the horned Moses.

  That was where I had met Bernd the previous year.

  “May I treat you to some ice cream?” he had asked me. I had smiled at him, for he seemed terribly shy. He was in his early twenties and good-looking with his long blond hair. It had clearly been difficult for him to speak to me. As I scrutinized him, he actually turned red.

  “Well, if you’re treating me to something, then I’d prefer a soda,” I said.

  We had walked for an hour in the Terme di Traiano. It already looked bad there at the time. The grass had dried up into a yellow-brown mat; the bushes were bare. Only the trees still found some water in the depths, but had shed most of their leaves in order to reduce the evaporation surface area. Even the pines had scattered an unusually thick carpet of needles. Green lizards scurried across the path; their bizarrely serrated body markings could have been designed by a Japanese lacquer artist.

  That had been a year earlier. Now the park was beset by wandering dunes, and it was dangerous to enter it after nightfall because the Praetorians trained their packs of semi-intelligent, genetically modified dogs there.

  Bernd studied ecotechnology and took his courses in botany at our institute. He brought the Rinascita Project to my attention, and many of us botanists hoped to get a job there. We saw it as a unique opportunity, for what need would there be for botanists if the plants died?

  * * *

  THE CONVENT OF the Piccole Sorelle dei Poveri behind high walls on the southern side of Piazza San Pietro we called the “aviary,” because it was occupied by little white birds. The order was founded in France, and still most of the Little Sisters were French. Strangely, they were all dainty and small, as if they had been bred especially for this convent, and they always appeared in small twittering groups. You never saw one of them alone. In the morning they flocked to their tasks in the city. Probably most of them worked as language teachers. In the late afternoon they returned and disappeared into the aviary behind the high walls. In the evening the gate to the convent was closed tight and secured with a thick chain.

  As I drove to the institute on June 30—the last day of the semester—all of Rome seemed to have begun to decompose. A sickeningly sweet corpse smell rose from the sewers, as if a seismic shift had opened ancient, previously undiscovered catacombs, and from the gaping mouths of the cellar windows wafted the stink of mold and rot. The air felt tallowy—smelled rancid, as if it had taken on a greasy, sweaty state. The sky dimmed leadenly.

  I drove across the piazza past the aviary to the parking lot, secured my Lectric, and was about to walk to the institute when Gina approached me and said, “We’re all in the church.” She cast an uneasy glance at the sky. I followed her, and together we entered the church. I was about to sit down in “my” spot bordered by pink marble, the cool grave slab of Nicolaus Cusanus, when I felt wetness. The marble tiles and slabs were covered with a shimmering sheen, and with my fingertips I touched a damp film.

  A trough of the Icelandic Low, deviating far south, extended over France into the western Mediterranean. Its cold air tongue pushed its way under the oppressive, dust-laden pall of smog that had accumulated over a year and a half of drought and lifted it up a few yards. That was enough.

  A peal of thunder rolled over the city, louder than any decibels the Praetorians had ever produced. We hurried outside. In the meantime, it had gotten as dark as if a solar eclipse were taking place. The air seemed to have congealed; a gray ground fog formed, creeping out of the sewers. Lightning flashed, lit up the whole sky like the inside of a gas-discharge lamp, and another peal of thunder rolled over the city. And then the beast that had lain over the city and smothered it for more than a year began to vomit. First came surreally large black and yellow globs that smacked into the sand and onto the pavement like bird droppings. In no time the ground was sprinkled and then covered with that sticky substance. Then the heavens began to roar like a cataract, and a few seconds later water came pouring down as if it formed a solid mass. And suddenly the ground was littered with a million foamy bubbles like gray-brown toad spawn, which the next moment were riddled by the impact of a stream of crystal clear bullets; they burst in white explosions and excavated one fleeting crater after another. Lightning incessantly lit up the darkness, and the peals of thunder merged into a deafening crescendo unlike anything I had ever witnessed before. We watched a group of the Piccole Sorelle who appeared at the cavernous descent of Via San Francesco di Paola. With hitched-up habits the nuns approached the gate of the aviary like a flock of white bantam chickens. They kept slipping on the slick layer that covered the pavement, and had trouble fighting their way through the masses of water, which flooded the piazza from one minute to the next and created an enormous lake in the southwest corner. In the past, the water could have drained unimpeded through a small alleyway
onto Via degli Annibaldi toward the Colosseo, but around the turn of the century some shortsighted building department official had issued a permit for the alley to be walled off, forcing the floods to seek a different outlet; they found it very quickly in the tunnel of Via San Francesco di Paola, which swallowed them like a thirsty throat, until it was clogged by sand.

  The thunderstorm moved on, but the heavy rain persisted. The monotonous pelting sound put me in a dreamy mood, and I had the sensation that the piazza was ascending like a spacious elevator toward the heavens.

  It rained all evening and half the night. The sirens of emergency vehicles and fire trucks could be heard again and again. Most of the students spent the night in the bed basement of the institute. The custodian grumpily gave his permission and reprovingly eyed the wine bottles that we had gotten at the supermarket. I offered him one of them. He scrutinized me severely, ran his hand with a sigh through his gray fringe of hair, then smiled, grabbed the bottle, and stashed it in the pocket of his gray work coat.

  The first daylight transported us into another world. It was lined with blue. The sun had its place again; the air was as cool as silk and flushed the lungs with invigorating freshness. This must be how salmon feel, I said to myself, when they have gone beyond the fetid waters at the mouth and are approaching the source. The palms in front of the institute glistened and gleamed under a clear, bright sky; the facades of the houses, still gnawed at by sulfuric acne and darkened by smog the day before, appeared as if they had been freshly whitewashed. The tower of the Borgia dynasty looked imposing and almost restored. The sand drifts on the steps and along the walls were gone; the piazza, on the other hand, looked like an oasis in the desert, or rather like a field of sand with a massive shallow puddle. And Via San Francesco di Paola no longer existed. Gone was the street sign on which generations of students had immortalized themselves with their initials; gone was the blind white eye in the aureole under the ancient lamp, which stared vacantly at those who descended Via San Francesco—actually not a road but a cavernous passage with steps—to Via Cavour; gone, too, was the old lamp. It had been ground away by the sand masses sliding through. The passage itself had turned into a compactly sand-filled tunnel. Since an excavator could not be used, the sand had to be dug out and vacuumed up by the fire department.

  We students helped out, and fourteen large truckfuls of sand were removed from the hole—plus one of the nice little white sisters. She had apparently not managed to climb the rest of the steps against the power of the cascading water and had been buried and smothered by the sand masses borne along by it. She seemed tiny laid out on the stretcher, and her little legs, which stuck out of the dirty white habit, looked like those of a small bird. Poor sorella, I thought, as the helpers carried her across the piazza to the convent, how fragile they actually are.

  So it was a sad day, even though the light broke through for the first time in many months and gave back colors to the world. And above us the swifts grazed with their blade-wings the fresh blue with which the sky was lined.

  The evening filled the horizon with molten orange, in which steel gray rafts of scabby cinders drifted; behind that a vast lagoon of turquoise and cobalt opened up, above which a soft lime green floated like a breath—dreamy coasts over the horizon, drawn on our retinas by stray photons, deceptive ethereal forms, engulfed by darkness within minutes.

  That night we saw the stars again for the first time in a long while. But the next day the temperature already rose above one hundred degrees again. The relentlessly hot air of Africa breathed down our necks, and the desert returned to besiege the city anew.

  * * *

  AS IF THE peristalsis of a long-dead body had suddenly been reactivated by a vigorous enema, the river had returned. It was indescribable, all that it carried along with it. At the Ponte Rotto, a barrier had formed, consisting of household items, mattresses, plastic bags, shopping carts, bicycles, branches, boards, and the decomposed cadavers of animals and birds, which had heaped up into a ten-foot-tall cliff obstructing the water. The vast quantities of sand had formed new islands rutted with deep drainage channels. Half the Sahara must have been in the streets of Rome. The sand, fine as dust, had within minutes clogged all the sewers. Soon a disgusting sludge rose up in tens of thousands of basements and low-lying dwellings, and what had amassed there then began to stink. A miasma spread, compared with which the effluvia of the Pontine Marshes could have passed for the atmosphere of a climate therapy resort. It was only a matter of time before yellow fever, malaria, and cases of dysentery would appear, for the muck had undoubtedly sloshed into many wells.

  The decayed tooth stump of the Castle of St. Angelo, which had displayed its concentrated ugliness for a few days, was enveloped by a sickly haze, and passed very gradually into a sort of virtual state, which allowed it to slide into a parallel universe. The Rome of our reality went on dying, but somehow the boundaries between the dimensions became blurred.

  * * *

  THE TEMPORARY RESURRECTION seemed to have had an impact on the Vatican peristalsis as well, for the vanished Istituto Pontificale della Rinascita della Creazione di Dio, San Francesco reappeared as if from a parallel world.

  My ICom chirped.

  “Yes, Luigi?”

  “A call, Domenica.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Falcotti, Bertolino.”

  “That can’t be!”

  “Would you like to accept?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have lightning and thunder brought you back to life, Signore Falcotti?” I asked point-blank.

  He laughed. “Are you still interested in the prospect I held out to you in our previous conversation?”

  “I’ve completed my degree, thank God. Botany was the last department that still held proper exams here this spring.”

  “I know. Most of the others have long since headed north.”

  “So I urgently need a job. After this semester, my scholarship expires. I can’t afford to be choosy.”

  “Well, it … it is not a job in that sense. As I already mentioned last time we spoke, it is a … longer-term commitment.”

  “Even better. Abroad?”

  “Within Europe, yes.”

  “No problem, Signore Falcotti.”

  “Excellent. I will be at the university the day after tomorrow. Would you have time for a conversation in person?”

  “I have all the time in the world.”

  “How enviable.”

  We made an appointment.

  * * *

  I HAD NEVER before been on the top floor of the university. In the hallway stood discarded furniture: ancient desks, which still had glass inkwells set into a narrow board over the lid; the folding seats were as tiny and cramped as if they had once served first-graders or Lilliputians. Next to the desks was a row of ugly chairs made of steel tubing with worn and slit-open white plastic upholstery, from which the yellow stuffing poured like old fat.

  Had I strayed into a wing that was no longer used? No, the room number Signore Falcotti had given me checked out. I knocked—no response. I pushed down the handle; the door was unlocked. Afternoon light streamed through half-open blinds into the large room. On the whitewashed wall behind the desk shone the gold from a gloomy icon. It was the room I had seen over the Vid connection during our first conversation. On the desk burned a thick yellow wax candle, emitting a cozy scent of honey. From hidden speakers came soft choral singing, which had a strangely light, dancing quality. On the large surface of the desk I saw an open laptop, surrounded by piles of books and periodicals. On top lay a fish paperweight, an astonishingly lifelike reproduction of a gilthead bream. It raised its head grimly and rested on its ventral fins.

  “Hello!” I called, but no one seemed to be there. I was about to leave when I heard a voice behind me in the hallway. Signore Falcotti was smaller and slighter than the image on the monitor had led me to suspect. The small rectangular reading glasses had slipped down almost to the tip of his nose.
He wore baggy black jeans and an open-necked white shirt with the sleeves rolled up halfway under a shabby light brown leather vest.

  With both hands he clasped my outstretched hand, as if we were old friends. He had a natural warmth, without any posture of exaggerated priestly attention, to which I had always been averse.

  “Please take a seat, Signorina Ligrina,” he said, gesturing to a leather armchair in front of the desk.

  “Thank you.”

  I sat down and involuntarily crossed my legs, before I realized that that was not exactly appropriate for the present occasion, that my demeanor left something to be desired, which could have negatively influenced the decision. How could I have been so thoughtless as to put on a knee-length skirt for an interview with a clergyman? Too late. And a demure tug at the hem of the skirt would only have drawn even more attention to it. I hoped that he did not misunderstand the exposure of my knees, but rather interpreted it as a sign of my easygoing nature.

  Signore Falcotti seemed not even to have registered it; his eyes were fixed on his laptop monitor. He was probably about to access my data. I noticed that I was inwardly tense. The fragrance of honey from the candle made my head a bit fuzzy, and I wondered in passing whether he had already had the close-cropped beard when we spoke over VidCom. No, I had a good memory for things like that; he must have grown it in the interim, and it suited him really well.

  “Is the music bothering you?” he suddenly asked, looking at me.

  “No, I find it interesting. For all its seriousness, somehow cheerful.”

  He nodded. “Perotin. Twelfth century.”

  He lifted the paperweight from the open periodical and closed it.

  “The gilthead bream looks very real,” I said.

  He gazed at the object in his hand. “You might find it hard to believe, but it is real.”

  “Cast in synthetic resin?”

  “No. It somehow turned into synthetic resin itself. It went through some sort of mysterious transubstantiation. A friend brought it back from Venice for me.”