Rome Noir

by Chiara Stangalino

  “Iu-gu-la. Iu-gu-la. Iu-gu-la.”

  Once again the cry broke the silence. The people had decided.

  Even before the Emperor, coming down from his dais surrounded by vestal virgins, turned his thumb down, the defeated gladiator moved. Advancing on his knees, he clasped his hands around the victor’s legs. Then he bowed deeply and, with exasperating slowness, bent his head forward. As soon as the head’s arc reached the end of its course, the victor, gripping the knife with both hands, plunged it straight into the victim’s neck. Up to the hilt.

  “Ha-bet, hoc ha-bet!”

  From the stands, a howl like thunder greeted the death.

  “What does iugula mean?”

  One of the two presumed CIA agents, the male, approached the bed from which the man attached to the drip and the electrocardiograph had just finished describing his vision. His name was John Dukakis, and he was a forty-three-year-old former soldier, who had joined the Army after his college education was paid for by ROTC scholarships; he was a veteran of the two Persian Gulf wars, and a native of Medina, a town in the western part of New York State.

  Agent Stone waited for the man’s reply in a room in a mysterious, small underground hospital connected to the U.S. embassy, on Via Veneto. Dukakis had been transported there after he fainted. Now, after he had been given the necessary care, and the medical personnel had been dismissed, he was being questioned. The only other people in the room, besides the two CIA agents, were the Army officer who had been present at the San Camillo hospital, Angelo Perosino, and an artist who specialized in sketching storyboards for film directors at Cinecittà, that Hollywood on the Tiber where all the great Italian films had been produced in the ’50s and ’60s by the likes of Fellini, Visconti, Rossellini, and De Sica. The artist was busily translating into images the story he had just heard from Dukakis, but the former soldier seemed to have nothing further to add.

  “What does iugula mean?” Agent Stone repeated.

  “I don’t know,” Dukakis said finally. “I only speak English. Those fiends in the stands were shouting it as though possessed.” Then he turned his head away, swallowed with difficulty, and half-closed his eyes.

  “It means sgozzalo, ‘cut his throat.’” Perosino chimed in. “The public at the gladiatorial contests shouted it when they wanted to demand the death of one of the two combatants.”

  “And that cry at the end?” the agent inquired further.

  “Habet, hoc habet?”

  “Yes, that one.”

  “It means ‘He got it.’ It refers to the sword thrust into his neck. The people shouted it when the defeated man ‘got’ the sword.”

  The illustrator had finished. He handed the sheets to the two agents. The woman took them. A series of quick sketches perfectly reconstructed the entire scene that Dukakis had described, alternating long shots and close-ups, as in a film sequence.

  The woman gestured to the others to follow her out to the corridor. She shook her head: “He’s a soldier who fought in the front lines, probably suffering from the trauma of a grenade or some variation of post-traumatic stress syndrome, and he must certainly be a fan of action films like Gladiator. The one with Russell Crowe as a Roman general sent to do combat in the arena. He is probably superimposing the film’s images on the scene of the real Colosseum.”

  “But Dukakis doesn’t know Latin!” the other agent interrupted.

  The woman quashed the objection with a quick hand gesture. Now she gazed severely at Perosino, her blue eyes like ice. It seemed that she would not allow her hypothesis to be proven wrong.

  Perosino regretted having to do so: “I’m sorry to contradict you, but that’s not possible. The patient’s account is much more faithful to the historic reality than the film is. In a number of details. Even if you ignore the issue of Latin, Dukakis’s description of the death ritual does not appear in the film and his details about the equipment are much more accurate. For one thing, Russell Crowe, in the role of Maximus, appears in the arena with armor that was worn not by gladiators but by soldiers of the Roman legions. The gladiators in Dukakis’s vision, on the other hand, fought bare-chested, as they did in actuality—”

  “Then you, too, Professor Perosino,” Agent Stone interrupted “believe that these subjects have ‘seen’ the past?”

  Little by little, as the conversation continued, Agent Stone was assuming an increasingly animated air. He stared off into space as he spoke, as if he were expecting at any moment to be visited himself by one of those visions.

  Perosino began to feel anxious. Though compelled to say that Stone was right, deep inside he sympathized with the skeptical position taken by Agent Miller. He decided that it was his turn to ask questions. “Do you think that what we have here are cases of ‘remote viewing’?” he asked point-blank.

  “Our driver will accompany you back to the university. The agreed-upon sum will be credited to your bank account. You have been a great help to us. Good day, Professor Perosino,” Agent Miller said as she moved off down the corridor. Agent Stone followed her without another word.

  III

  “It’s happened again.”

  Angelo Perosino looked up from his Negroni. Standing in front of him in his Armani suit, Agent Stone stared at him from behind the shield of his inevitable sunglasses. Once again Perosino took offense. He had always gauged the meagerness of his salary as a university researcher by the cost of an Armani suit. It would take a month’s pay for one to buy an Armani suit. But only on sale at the end of the season. This is what Angelo Perosino thought whenever he felt discouraged about his work, and this is what he thought now when Agent Stone appeared before him.

  “Have something. Can I offer you an apéritif, Agent Stone?” He spoke as though defying poverty. His own poverty.

  Stone looked around. They were at Café Fandango in Piazza di Pietra, in the very heart of Rome, behind the Pantheon and opposite an impressive colonnade that once marked the boundary of a pagan temple but had later been incorporated into a structure less than a thousand years old. Café Fandango, owned by a successful independent producer, was frequented by writers and film people. Perosino went there often, hoping to be able to market one of his many stories of ancient Rome for a film.

  “There’s something you definitely have to see, Professor Perosino.”

  Stone was peremptory, as usual. Once again Perosino followed him.

  During the drive to the covert hospital attached to the embassy, Stone and Perosino did not speak. Their silence was broken only when the driver deviated from the route and took Via dei Fori Imperiali in order to pass by the Colosseum.

  “Do you like the Colosseum, Professor Perosino?” Agent Stone asked, indicating the seven concentric circles of arches that had once been adorned with huge slabs of travertine marble.

  “The Colosseum is Rome. I was born here. These are things that happen to you. You don’t have the option of liking or disliking them.”

  “You don’t believe that the past can reappear, Professor Perosino?” Agent Stone asked him after a brief pause.

  “Rome is the Eternal City, I imagine you’ve heard it said, Agent Stone. When you live in eternity you don’t believe in anything,” Perosino replied.

  Yet even as he spoke those words of deliberate cynicism, the researcher, confused by the noise of the traffic, had the momentary impression that he was seeing his city on the night before a spectacle, two thousand years ago. The blaring car horns sounded to him like the infernal din of the carts making their way from the animal parks of the imperial gardens, carrying the beasts toward the inevitable, their sole performance in the arena. Locked in dark cages, they would wait in the underground crypts of the Colosseum, already buried under the earth’s crust.

  In the hospital room where the most recent hallucinator had been treated, Perosino and Stone found only Agent Miller awaiting them. This time the person shattered by the visions was a woman. A young woman, exceedingly pale, with huge green eyes, lying in a state of persi
stent catatonia. Maybe because she was covered with a white sheet, maybe because she was so beautiful and unreachable—like the ancient priestesses of the goddess Vesta, who took a vow of eternal chastity and were buried alive if they broke their vows—for a moment the American girl seemed to Perosino like a vestal virgin dressed in white. One of those eternal virgins who surrounded the Emperor on his dais during the gladiator games. In the end, Perosino said to himself, she, too, seemed to be buried alive in the grave of a psyche lacerated by the apparition.

  “What do you see in these images, Professor Perosino?”

  Agent Miller interrupted the flow of the researcher’s thoughts as she placed before him the visual transcription of the girl’s account, which must already have been heard before his arrival and recorded by the Cinecittà sketch artist.

  Perosino looked at the drawings. He looked at them and was horrified. They portrayed a woman prisoner who, wrapped in a cowhide in the middle of the arena, was made to couple with an enormous white bull. In subsequent images, the body of the woman, already mutilated, was pierced by the tip of a red-hot spear, brandished by someone wearing the winged headdress of the god Mercury. Appearing next in the scene was someone with a bird’s beak, wearing a clinging garment and pointed leather shoes, holding a large hammer with a very long handle. This monstrous creature had seized hold of the unfortunate victim’s corpse and was smashing the skull with the hammer. Finally, the Colosseum workers, using big hooks, dragged the corpse out of the arena. The hooks were lodged in the flesh of the woman’s belly, already perforated by the bull. In the stands, surrounding the scene of carnage, the public was in ecstasy.

  “What do you see in those images, professor?” Agent Miller repeated.

  “I see the myth,” Perosino replied, casting a compassionate glance at the girl lying on the bed. She might be more or less the same age as the torture victim, and to have witnessed that scene must have been severely traumatizing.

  “What do you mean, professor?” Agent Miller pressed.

  “The scenes are mythological. The coupling between a woman and a bull recalls the myth of Pasiphae, the wife of Minos, king of Crete, who became infatuated with a bull she was given by Poseidon, and had herself shut up inside a faithful reproduction of a heifer, constructed by the architect Daedalus, in order to copulate with the beast. The creature with the bird’s beak is Charon, the demon who ferried the souls of the dead to the other side of the river Styx in Hades. In the beliefs of the ancient Romans, this figure, inspired by Charu, the Etruscan god of death, was almost always accompanied by the god Mercury, who appears here armed with a spear.”

  “Now it’s all clear!” Agent Miller was elated. “This proves that our patients’ so-called ‘visions’ are actually inspired by concepts and images derived from previous knowledge. In this instance, the girl, a student of archeology at Stanford, drew upon sources of the classical myth that she must surely be familiar with.”

  Angelo Perosino glanced again at the girl shattered by the apparitions, lost in sympathy. Then he shook his head vigorously. “Unfortunately, that’s not the case, Agent Miller. These mythological performances were actually staged in the Colosseum at the expense of some poor unfortunate. The violent copulation between the woman and the bull was made possible by the fact that the cowhide in which the victim was wrapped was first smeared with the blood of a cow in heat. It was the ancient Romans who believed in the reality of myths, not us.”

  At that moment the girl was shaken by a paroxysm and began thrashing around in her bed.

  “Maybe she’s trying to tell us something,” Perosino suggested.

  “She hasn’t spoken since yesterday. She stopped talking right after finishing the account of her vision,” Stone informed him.

  “Why did you wait until now to call me?” Perosino asked.

  “Agent Miller felt that your advice was no longer needed,” Stone explained.

  Using gestures, the girl asked to see the drawings. When she had them in her hands, she threw all except one to the floor. She turned the single sheet over to the blank side, took a pencil from the bedside table, and, with some difficulty, wrote a few phrases in Latin.

  “Would you translate them for us?” Miller asked Perosino.

  The researcher hesitated, still somewhat offended, then took the paper and read:

  As long as the Colosseum stands, Rome will stand. When the Colosseum falls, Rome will fall. When Rome falls, the world will fall.

  “What kind of nonsense is this?” asked Agent Miller, more intractable than ever. Her colleague Stone, meanwhile, clasped his hands in his lap, almost as if he were praying. He awaited Perosino’s answer with an eager gaze.

  “It’s the prophecy of a wise man of late antiquity, who has come down in history by the name of the Venerable Bede.” Perosino moved away from the bed toward the other end of the room, where a halogen lamp gave off a faint light. “Unfortunately, it never came true,” he added. Then, not knowing what else to do, he turned the paper over and looked again at the drawing. “To be fair, perhaps there is an inconsistency,” Perosino concluded after a few seconds’ observation.

  Agent Miller immediately rushed over to him, followed by Stone.

  “Look here, in the stands, among the spectators,” Perosino said to Miller, indicating a woman, one of the vestals who surrounded the Emperor in their immaculate white garments. Like everyone else, the young priestess was staring at the scene of the woman and the bull. But unlike the others, she was watching the torture through a strange device that she held ten centimeters from her face, at eye level. The gadget, a slim metal rectangle from which protruded an oblong cone with a lens at the end, was some sort of optical device. Upon closer inspection, the mysterious object appeared to be a camera.

  Agent Miller sighed with relief. “Did the girl also describe this detail to the artist?” she asked her colleague.

  “This too,” Agent Stone was forced to admit.

  “Excellent, there’s your proof that these are hallucinatory fantasies rather than remote viewing of the past,” Agent Miller ruled outright.

  At that moment, however, the girl behind them began gurgling. Stone, Miller, and Perosino hurried to the bed. The girl was trying to say something, but the words were incomprehensible sounds burbling in her throat, almost choking her. Perosino, thinking she was spitting up blood, moved to ring the bell that would alert the medical personnel.

  Agent Miller stopped him: “Hold on, professor.” The agent again handed the young woman the paper and pencil.

  The unfortunate girl, her face waxen as a lily, scrawled a brief phrase: What appears in the visions is not the past. It’s the future.

  THE MELTING POT

  BY TOMMASO PINCIO

  Via Veneto

  Translated by Ann Goldstein

  It all began right in the middle of that endless season that went down in history as “the Great Summer.” Suddenly, without knowing how, I found myself in Vietnam. I was watching American soldiers fighting and dying in the jungle. Above me helicopters roared amid clouds of napalm. Then I looked up and saw the fan that hung from the ceiling of my room in the Hotel Excelsior.

  It was only a dream and I was still in Rome. But it felt like a jungle in the tropics. The fan blades fluttered through the oppressive air of the room without providing any relief. They turned uselessly, like my life.

  I was dripping with sweat; I had slept more than eight hours but I was still exhausted. It was an effort to get up. I ate breakfast listening to the same things the radio had been repeating every day for I don’t know how long. The daytime temperature never went below 110 degrees. The health department recommended not going outside before sunset.

  I looked out the window as I finished drinking my coffee. It was getting dark, and throngs of foolish Chinese had begun to invade Via Veneto. I observed the rows of red lanterns and the signs crowded with ideograms whose meaning I didn’t know. Another torrid night of hell awaited me in the city of the apocalypse. Hardly
the Dolce Vita. Now there was only summer, and Rome had become a world upside down, an enormous Chinatown where the heat forced people to live like vampires, sleeping by day and working by night. I should have left like everyone else when I still had the chance.

  I went back to the bedroom and discovered that, just as they say, the worst has no limits. A girl had appeared out of nowhere and was lying motionless in my bed. She was half-naked and lay inert, on her stomach, her legs slightly spread, her arms extended along her sides, palms turned up, her face sunk in the pillow. She certainly looked dead. I hadn’t the slightest idea who she could be; it had been quite a while since I’d been intimate with a woman.

  When I tried to turn the girl’s head I made another crazy discovery. Her face seemed to be stuck to the pillow. I tried several times. I finally took her by the hair and pulled her head, pressing the pillow against the bed. Nothing, the face wouldn’t come free. And in continuation of this theme that the worst has no limits, just at that moment someone knocked on the door.

  With a corpse in the room it would have been wiser to pretend not to be home. What in the world would I have said if I had found myself facing the police? But I opened it anyway. Something compelled me to. Don’t ask what because I don’t know. Luckily it was Signor Ho, the manager of the hotel.

  “I have the bill for the overdue rent,” he said. I glanced at the papers and gasped. He had nearly doubled the rent, holding me responsible for, among other things, the air-conditioning. I protested. The increase was robbery. As for air-conditioning, the system had never worked. Almost nothing worked in that lousy hotel.

  “There are new rules now,” said Signor Ho. “Everyone pays for the cool air now. If your system broken, my worker fix it. If you don’t like new rules, you out. If you don’t pay, you out.”