Rome Noir

by Chiara Stangalino

  He changed into a clean shirt and walked toward Via Cavour and Stazione Termini. Here, the package he had ordered was left, as promised, in the luggage locker he had been sent a key for the week before. The transaction had not proven cheap, but then again, money was now the least of his worries. The gun had been left at the bottom of a plastic Rinascente bag in which the seller had buried it, with no sense of irony, under a crumpled mess of seemingly used women’s silk lingerie. This was not the ideal place to check the weapon out, but it appeared in good shape, and should contain six bullets. He would not require more. He treated himself to an espresso at one of the station’s cafeterias and watched with melancholy how the two spoons of sugar drifted slowly toward the bottom of the small cup. Just the way espresso coffee should behave, he recalled her teaching him when they were still together. He sketched a wry smile for any curious onlookers. The coffee and sugar boost gave him a fresh sense of purpose, renewed his determination to see this all through.

  He walked away from the bar and the busy train station and took the direction of the Campo dei Fiori, past the unescapable ancient monuments surrounded by wide-eyed tourists. Shortly after crossing the Piazza Vidoni, the Roman streets became quieter again, as if foreigners no longer ventured this far, beyond their self-circumscribed tourist enclave, and he made his way down Corso Vittorio Emanuele II until he reached the Feltrinelli bookshop. He walked upstairs and ordered his second espresso of the day and a panini and sat at the edge of the store’s balcony watching the customers mill below as they picked up random books and shopped at their leisure. She had once written to him, a long time ago, before they had even slept together and were still enjoying a mildly flirtatious stream of e-mail communications, that this was her favorite spot in all of Rome to waste time, meditate, observe others, casually do her homework. On his fateful initial visit here, this was also the first place she’d taken him and they had spent an hour here, nervously silent most of the time, knowing that a few hours later they would be in bed together for the first time. He remembered every single moment—the perfume she had worn, the heat radiating from her white skin as their knees brushed against each other and she contrived to make her cappuccino last forever as if scared to move on to the next, concrete and physical stage in their affair.

  He didn’t expect to find her here today. She was now studying in a different area, but still he had to come visit the place again. Just in case. To commune with the past. To reopen old wounds. To feel the hurt inside. It was foolish, he knew, but if he had to march down this calvary road of his own making, the Feltrinelli bookshop could not be avoided. The latest novel by Walter Veltroni and the Italian edition of the final Harry Potter book were piled high by the cash registers and staff kept on replenishing the displays on a steady basis. He’d sent her the English-language edition of the Rowling when it had appeared, but by then they were no longer on speaking terms and she had not even thanked him or acknowledged the gift, one of many over the months they had known each other. The first book she had sent him as a gift was a collection of stories by Italo Calvino. Strange how he remembered every single, irrelevant detail.

  Finally, his stomach reminded him he hadn’t had a real meal since a dim sum in London’s Chinatown the day before, so he left the bookshop and headed across the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II toward the Campo dei Fiori and the Pollarolla restaurant where he had a pleasant memory of fragole di bosco with a fine dusting of sugar. Of course, he had also taken her there, once upon a time. Because of a stomach condition, she was not allowed to eat any spicy food, which he’d always considered something of a tragedy. But the meal today, insalata verde and risotto ai funghi, could not feed the pain inside, and later, as he walked back to his hotel, he made a detour by Stazione Termini and under cover of darkness surrounded by rushing commuters and loitering teenagers he slipped his left hand deep into the plastic bag he had now been carrying for half of the day and felt the hard grip of the gun down there. It felt real. By Stazione Termini he sat down and wept.

  He woke up early. Escaping the inevitable dreams of her, of them. The sheer epiphany of her body, the ever so subtle and patently unique color of her nipples, the broadness of her smile, the terrible harshness of her words on the phone the last time he had called her, the luscious sound of her sigh every time he had penetrated her. The places they’d been, the things they’d said.

  He always woke up early these days, maybe as an automatic reaction to the sleeping memories of her and the abominable pain they invariably inflicted on his soul.

  He adjusted his eyes, wiped the night away, and moved his right leg.

  Yes, he was in Rome.

  Alone.

  He passed on breakfast, picked up a map of the city from an older woman now manning the hotel’s reception desk, and, avoiding the elevator and its ornate metal grille, walked down the stairs to the street and found the rental car. He hadn’t been ticketed, after all. Small mercies.

  He pulled the gun from the depths of the Rinascente plastic bag and moved it to the glove compartment. Not an ideal place to keep it, but there were few good hiding places in the hotel room. He would just have to drive carefully and not attract police attention. The busy Roman traffic would help.

  Before driving off, he phoned Alessandra, Giorgio, and Marina and made appointments to see them separately throughout the day. They were all surprised to find out he was in Rome, but sounded happy enough to meet up with him.

  With the festival organizers he talked about books and movies and cultural politics. As they always did when they met at events. It was amazing how buoyant they remained every single year in the face of mounting difficulties in obtaining funding, grants, and sponsorships. Of course, they asked him why he was in Rome. “Just passing through,” he would answer with a fake smile, and this seemed to satisfy them. They embraced and made a vow to see each other again at the next festival and went their separate ways.

  Alessandra knew a small trattoria in the Trastevere, concealed within a labyrinth of cobbled streets and small churches only a local could navigate with impunity and find a way out of again. He meekly followed her. Night was falling. Inside, he felt ever so empty. Following the break-up with Desi, he had almost fallen into bed with Alessandra since both had been on the rebound from heart shattering affairs. But it hadn’t happened. They knew each other professionally, and she had also been aware of his relationship with Desi, as they both freelanced for the same magazines. Maybe it was because neither of them were sufficiently head over heels about the other, or maybe they both lacked the energy for purely recreational sex. Sometimes you want the tenderness and the feelings, and the physicality wasn’t enough to conquer the inner thirst. At any rate, after a failed attempt at meeting up in Paris for a tryst, they’d drifted apart, either to other adventures or, in his case, a desert of loneliness. He expected nothing of tonight either. It was just a way of saying goodbye to a friendship. No less, no more.

  The cuisine was Sicilian and for the first time ever he tried pasta with sardines, followed by great bowls of steamed shellfish, with a succulent sauce they both soaked up with freshly baked local bread. The small piazza outside the restaurant was shrouded in darkness as he looked out of the windows of the restaurant, somehow expecting Desi to walk by at any moment, like a ghost from the past.

  “Still thinking about her?” Alessandra asked.

  “Yes,” he answered. “It’s a sickness. I know. Don’t tell me.”

  “There’s a character in Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera who tries to cure himself of a case of unrequited love by bedding 622 women,” she remarked, as if proposing a cure.

  “It would feel too much like revenge,” he pointed out. “Anyway, it wasn’t unrequited. I have pages and pages of e-mails, text messages, and letters to prove it. And I know every square inch of her body at rest and play, every obscene crease and every single silky surface.”

  “You always had a wonderful way with words…” Alessandra sighed.

  “But
words are insufficient now,” he answered. “Powerless. She no longer answers my messages, listens to me. She probably thinks I’ve gone mad. And she’s probably right.”

  “Did you come to Rome to try and see her?” Alessandra asked.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t know. Maybe I just came for myself…”

  He offered to drive her back to her apartment on the other side of the river.

  The car moved along the Tiber on the Lungotevere heading north. Even at this time of night, the traffic was thick. Alessandra insisted on smoking a cigarette. He opened his window and looked out. Across the river was an old-fashioned building, white and functional under the light of a three-quarter moon: the San Filippo Neri Hospital. A knot twisted inside his stomach—wasn’t this where she had been born or where her father, the surgeon, worked? Or both?

  Alessandra invited him up for a final coffee, but he declined.

  “I have to get up early in the morning,” he said. It would have been pointless.

  Back on the hotel bed, he prayed for sleep. When it finally came, hours later—the sounds of the Roman night punctuated by sirens and the odd boisterous laugh of passersby in the street outside—it was an ocean of despair and memories that he just couldn’t banish. It was a warm night and he kept wiping away the sweat between his legs and under his chin, as he thrashed around feverishly between the crisp white sheets.

  Even sleep was no longer a refuge.

  She lived in the hills behind the Olympic Stadium.

  He painfully managed to find his way there, maneuvering the car with difficulty with an unfolded map on his knees and dodging cars that sped past him. She had pointed out the area to him when they had driven nearby on the way to secret places where they could fuck, but he had a hell of a time today finding his way past the Olympic Stadium. Once in the hills, it was no better and he arrived at the top by mistake, enjoying a view of both central Rome and all the neighboring hills he remembered from his history and Latin lessons all those years past. Oh, there was the Vatican. And there was the road that led out of town to the lake and Calcata, past the neglected area whose name he couldn’t recall where, she had told him, prostitutes and low-life came out at night, then further down the road the RAI buildings. She had confessed to an unholy fascination with the whores there when she had been a teenager and how she had always imagined what they were doing and how she would act if she were one.

  He studied the map carefully and found her street. He drove off downwards in its direction.

  Via Luigi Credaro was a cul-de-sac and a small supermarket occupied the ground floor of the apartment building where she still lived with her parents. He managed to park a hundred meters away on the opposite side of the road.

  Though he had never been here, he seemed to remember her saying that the apartment occupied the top two floors of the building. Did her bedroom overlook the street, or was it on another side of the building facing the hills or a different part of the city?

  So, this was where she had mostly grown up, apart from those years in the country when she had commuted to school in the city by train. It felt strange being here. He kept his eye on the door to the building; the supermarket was open and customers trickled in and out.

  He opened the glove compartment and took out the gun and placed it between his thighs on the car seat. He’d never fired a gun in his life, let alone owned one. But he had read enough books and articles and knew the basics—the safety, the caliber, the damage it could invariably cause.

  I’m crazy, totally crazy, he thought. He’d been in love before, of course, but never had he been so obsessed with a woman, a girl, or missed her so much. Without her, he had sadly realized, he was nothing.

  However much he knew that things could never have worked out between them after the initial year-long honeymoon of covert meetings and fiery fucks in forbidden places, he still couldn’t give up on her totally, admit defeat, let her, and him, get on with their respective lives. She was younger. She still had a life—adventures, as she’d put it—ahead of her. He didn’t. Not without her.

  It was a few weeks before when he had been doing some Internet research for a story that he had stumbled across a pornographic website replete with photos submitted by nonprofessionals; openly voyeuristic images of nudity, both simple and extreme, and of couples having intercourse. He had distractedly spent a quarter of an hour surfing through the images and noting the monotonous repetition of positions and angles, when he had come across a series of eight shots in which the woman’s face was out of the frame but her opulent white ass stood front and center, her wet, pink gash circled by unruly black curls, fully exposed along with the puckered, darker areola of her back door. The young woman was on her knees, her rear right in the camera’s face. From image to image the ass came nearer and nearer to the fore, and in the final three photographs a resplendently thick and hard penis took aim at the woman’s cunt and was then seen entering it and finally deeply embedded up to the ball sack.

  He had of course seen a thousand photographs of this kind before, but this time the shape, the color, the details of the woman’s ass recalled hers in indelible resemblance. He’d been violently sick, rushing to the bathroom and spewing out all the contents of his stomach over the carpet long before reaching the safety of the ceramic bowl. It had been like a knife to his heart. Naturally, he knew that he could not expect her to keep on being faithful to him in the whole year since their break-up, and since when do women in their twenties have to act as nuns? But somehow the images on his laptop had brought it all home, the idea of another man fucking her, owning her, playing with her, and, worse, getting her to allow him to broadcast photographs of their terrible intimacy across the web.

  A few hours later, he had hesitantly peered at the photographs again and realized it wasn’t her, couldn’t be her. A few meshes of the woman’s hair were in the frame of one of the images and the color was not hers; also, there was a distinctive mole absent in a familiar area of her lunar landscape, he discovered, to his relief. But the scar was still there. Inside him. Who was she with now? Who did she love now, she who had once loved him?

  The door to the building opened and a woman walked out, plump, dark-haired, almost a vision of what Desi might look like twenty years later. Her mother?

  The heat of the day hammered against the parked car, but he couldn’t switch the air-conditioning on or the battery would go flat.

  Was she now alone in her room in the large two-floor apartment?

  Or maybe she was now in a small hotel room by Lake Bracciano, being ploughed by another man. It had been, after all, she who had discovered that hideaway.

  Enough. Enough.

  I am sick. I am sick.

  Sick enough to climb the stairs to the apartment, ring the bell, confront her when she opened the door, and brandish the gun? If you can’t be mine, you can’t be anyone else’s…? The pitiful stuff of tabloid journalism. Come on!

  He could sit here all day and not see her, he realized. And even if she did emerge, what would he do then? Follow her? Stalk her? He’d lose her in traffic most likely.

  In her anger, when he would refuse to let her go and beg for a last meeting, a final embrace, a penultimate conversation, she would always fire back that he had no respect for her and could not accept what she felt. She had these crazy ideas about respect, but he did understand what she meant.

  In a letter, one of so many, too many, he had written that loving her was also knowing when to let her go, but it was a precept he had proven incapable of adhering to.

  What the fuck was he doing in Rome? What the hell was he doing with a gun?

  There’s no way he could kill her.

  Damn.

  He drove off, found the highway that led out of town, past the desolate and empty marketplace where the whores were said to congregate at night like in a Fellini film, sped past the RAI buildings and into the countryside.

  The sky was blue.

  Maybe he could find peace after all
.

  There was a junction with a road that led to Lake Bracciano and Trevignano. He sighed and drove past it, his mind assaulted by more memories of nearby hotel rooms where they had made love and had once been unbearably happy. Watching her emerge from the shower, her wet, unfurled hair hanging all the way down her back. Putting that cheap necklace around her throat.

  The next turn-off was for the medieval town of Calcata. He was just over forty kilometers from the city, in the Parco Treja Tuscia. Here, behind the high, fortified ramparts in a small stone house, where the February cold had chilled their bones to the marrow and forced them to spend almost two whole days in bed—talking nonstop between the tender fucking, learning about each other, getting accustomed to the taste of each other, growing bolder with mind and body and plunging headfirst into transgression—he had moved inside her for the first time and fallen in love with her. Forever.

  Calcata looked the same. In all likelihood it had not changed in a few hundred years. Once abandoned, the small town had been repopulated several decades ago by hippies and was now turning into a historical arts center, with medieval summer houses for rich Romans, artists, or visiting lovers, art galleries, and a handful of tiny country restaurants. The whole town, whose population still didn’t number more than nine hundred people normally, was built on a hilltop of volcanic rock.