A little bell rang with a bright, busy sound as I entered the shop. Not a soul to be seen. The shelves were chock-full all the way up nearly to the ceiling, the colorful wares neatly arranged. A maze whose few, narrow aisles in fact only ever led to the till and back to the exit. I was not hungry or thirsty, nor did I have any desire to choose something. Perhaps I already had everything I could wish for; at any rate my basket remained empty. The bell tinkled again. A man came rushing in. He was wearing an old uniform with shiny buttons and looked at me as if he wanted me to speak to him. Passing the till, I saw a woman, the shop assistant, standing there, having seemingly appeared out of nowhere. Her gaze was as empty as if she had spent her entire life in this place, weary and simultaneously expectant. I had not noticed her before. Instinctively I grabbed a newspaper, rummaged around for some loose change. The shopkeeper called out something to the man. I did not understand a single word. And no matter how hard I tried, I would never understand any of it. She sat down, her hands dropped into her lap, and it was then that I saw it, a tattoo on the inside of her right wrist, a white horse’s head with a pale blue spiral horn on its forehead, surrounded by pink clouds. My coins jangled in the little bowl. A question from the shopkeeper, a hurried shake of the head from me, and again the shame that, whenever anyone here addressed me, I could never understand a word. A cluster of gold bangles slid over the tattoo and back again. Hand and unicorn drifted up to the shopkeeper’s face, she fiddled with her dyed blonde hair, patted a few strands into place. For a brief moment it was right up close, looking at me. A bright spot shone in its big blue comic-book eye. Its gaze was friendly, harmless, and penetrating all at once. Then the creature was gone again, searching in the open drawer for change.
Nonetheless a sign, an unmistakable pointer. There was no ignoring it. I tried to close my eyes and ears to it, rushed out, the irritating tinkle sounded once more, then I was back in the square and turned into the main street, with rapid steps, almost light-footed, not rushing, uphill, back or away, it didn’t matter. My heart suddenly loud, like on a hunt or on the run. It was easily startled, its pounding went right up into my neck. It did me good simply to walk on, to abandon myself to gravity. Step by step, away from the horn. Dragons may be vanquished, dead and buried, their fossilized bones assembled into skeletons and exhibited in museums with the aid of steel stays, but the unicorn, that vulgar, ridiculous, transparent thing, was immortal, indestructible, ubiquitous—be it on the wrist of a cashier or in the Cabinet of Curiosities in Basel’s Totengässlein. Smooth and lustrous, it had stood there, hard, the size of it breathtaking. A specimen of itself. The largest monster of all. “Do not touch,” it said. As if I might have been wanting to stroke the ivory, calcium phosphate turned on nature’s lathe. An antidote to any poison. A miracle remedy. But I was not ill. I was tiptop. And not so desperate that I would fall for a horn. After all, I was no longer a virgin. Although in its eyes perhaps I was. What would it do with me, then, in the middle of the forest? Nestle its head against my breast or lay its horn in my lap? Really it all amounted to the same thing. The joys of virginity? Where there’s a horn there’s a hole. The hymen, too, was merely an enemy to be speared. An apple needing picking. If only it were that simple.
The road curved around, and beyond it, on a plateau, a small village appeared, its blackish-brown houses huddled around the church, surrounded by grazing land, perched above a steep rocky drop, barely a hundred meters away but separated from me by a ravine. Not far from the precipice, two brown horses were grazing in a paddock. They stood facing in opposite directions, with not their heads but their tails turned towards each other, mirror images, as if wearing an invisible harness and awaiting their orders. That scene looked familiar. But from where? Two horses, rear to rear. From school, an illustration in a history book, a drawing in shades of sepia. A picture showing horses straining in opposite directions, their necks thrusting forward beneath the whip, the huge effort, their bits covered in foam. Lines of sweat under their harnesses. Two six-horse or even eight-horse teams, their heads turned away. And between them an orb with everything sucked out of it: a vacuum, an unimaginable void, a dead space. Behind it the panorama of a hilly landscape, and above it, floating in the sky, two hemispheres, a pair of divine, blind eyeballs. Nothing was more terrible than empty space. And every single monster there solely to fill it, to obscure the blind spot of fear, making it doubly invisible. A feeling in my stomach, lifeless and heavy. No boulder in sight, nowhere to sit down. I stopped walking, dropped into a squat. My insides a clenched fist. Is this what emptiness felt like? How heavy was emptiness? The realms of possibility were a fertile breeding ground. The realms of impossibility too. A white delivery van thundered past me. I crossed the road, discovered on the other side a dark opening in the undergrowth, a sunken path, a channel that dug itself ever deeper into the forest, the brushwood like a wall on each side. Bare deciduous trees, then before long the shade of fir trees. The ground was spongy and strewn with copper-colored needles. A hollow knocking was audible from somewhere. Otherwise it was completely quiet. My footsteps deadened, almost soundless. The path meandering aimlessly. It descended along a gorge for a time, then carried on close to the rock face, until eventually it fizzled out altogether on a shady knoll. The terrain now became more open, affording a view of the broad western basin. The mountain flanks protruded into the lowlands like pieces of stage scenery. Glinting in the haze was the river from which the valley took its name. Now I also saw, not that far off, a bare patch in the forest where the trees were lying higgledy-piggledy like fallen matches. Alpine choughs screeched high above, let themselves fall and then climbed their way back up beyond the tree line. Behind them, a semiderelict barn clung to the slope, unreachable, like a painting—framed by the white of the snow, as remote as summer. Incredible that there could actually be a track leading to it. Where were the signposts when you needed them? On an embankment, a handful of stones between two lumps of rock, piled in layers, almost a flight of steps, a marker, the hint of a path. Pains in my knees, in my groin, in my lower back. Why couldn’t my body just work the way it said in the textbook? What had I done to it that it was reluctant to obey? That it did whatever it wanted. And not what I wanted. The path was getting ever steeper now, more like a chamois track. It was better on all fours anyway. At least that way I made some headway. I felt my way up, crawled through loose shale and scree until there was more vegetation again, a sparse covering of grass, almost a meadow. Then a house, then another, a whole group scattered over a mountainside. A settlement, a little village. And then the white chapel, the water trough. It was the hamlet, my hamlet! The same place I had set out from hours ago. As if I had known the answer to a riddle all along. All my ramblings for nothing. I couldn’t even get lost properly. Was I relieved, or was I disappointed? Probably both. A thin plume of smoke rose from one of the chimneys, and there was a red car in the small parking lot. I was no longer alone.
The living room was cold, the stove giving out no warmth. The logs simply wouldn’t light. In the end, I helped things along with a stack of photocopies, until the flames finally sent some sparks flying. Even after supper there was no letup in the pain. It felt as if something was drilling into my innards. My legs leaden. Then, on the toilet during the night, the blackish-brown blood in my pants. A sign, as unmistakable as the dull ache in my lower abdomen and the pain in my breasts. The newspaper lay on the tiles, on its front page the photograph of a forest after a fire, a hazy landscape with charred tree trunks and spindly green pine trees. By the time I finally fell asleep, it was already getting light outside. A few hours later I woke up. Everything was bathed in a gray haze, which initially I took for fog until I realized that it was clouds that had drifted down from higher altitudes. I put wood on the fire, went back to bed and browsed a guide to Alpine wildlife until my eyes went woozy and I nodded off. When I awoke again, the clouds had grown denser. It was so silent that the thought briefly crossed my mind that mankind had perishe
d. The thought did not frighten me; on the contrary, it was comforting. I cleared the books off the table, washed my laundry in the sink, hung it up over the stove and cooked myself a few shriveled potatoes. In the evening I opened a bottle of red wine I had found under the sink. Then I decided to paint a self-portrait, but the only mirror was on the wall of the unheated bathroom and I couldn’t manage to release it from its brackets.
A few days later, as I was heading home from a walk, a man came towards me. He was small and his skin smooth as leather. Apparently pleased to see me, he immediately started chattering away to me in animated fashion, and unusually fast for that dialect. It seemed to be about something important. I told him that I couldn’t understand what he was saying. He repeated his litany, just as rapidly as before, until I shook my head again. He had blackish-brown, deep-set eyes protected by bushy brows. He looked at me, then at my boots and walked on without any gesture of regret or apology.
That night there was a thunderstorm with persistent sheet lightning. The storm tore at the shutters. As I was unable to sleep, I took a look at the photographs in the wildlife guide, and spotted among them the neon-green weave that was now gracing my kitchen table. It was the wolf lichen, which is highly toxic to the nervous systems of carnivorous vertebrates. I took the dry, green bundle and a shovel and buried it behind the house in the rain. Then I spent a long time washing my hands, arms and face with dish soap. Finally, I fell into a deep, exhausted sleep.
When I woke up in the morning, a cuckoo was calling. I heeded its call and went out. A warm fall wind was blowing. The jagged outline of the mountain ridge against the pale-blue sky looked like a paper cutout. It was hard to tell whether the sky had pushed in front of the mountains, or the mountains in front of the clouds. Dew lay on the grass. The white patches in the forest had melted to dots. The rushing sound was audible even from a distance. The ravine now had water flowing through it which plunged, gurgling, into the depths. The thaw had begun. I went back, packed my things, vacuumed, hid the key behind the firewood stacked against the wall and set off downhill towards the valley.
Valle Inferno
Villa Sacchetti
also known as Villa al Pigneto del Marchese Sacchetti
* Commissioned by brothers Giulio and Marcello Sacchetti and built between 1628 and 1648, Villa Sacchetti is regarded as the most important early work of master builder Pietro da Cortona.
† Towards the end of the seventeenth century the mansion is already starting to deteriorate. In the mid-eighteenth century both wings of the building collapse. The last remnants of the ruins are taken away after 1861.
Like every ruler, this city has two bodies. Its mortal one lies there like a defiled corpse; a quarry whose marble burns to lime in the furnaces. The pale stone harbors no fossils, yet is itself an imprint of a prehistoric age, a raw block of memory. But its immortal body rises out of the spoil heap in the imagination of strangers daydreaming before the ruins, who pause, frozen in awe, as a whole army of noble and distinguished sons, led by painters, copper engravers, and literary figures, marches into the city and besieges the inns around the Spanish Square. Year in, year out, artists from northern latitudes step down from dusty stagecoaches, a letter of recommendation from some house of high standing, an allowance from a patron or an academy grant in their leather bag—and undoubtedly the address of some fellow countryman who came here many years ago for one winter and has stayed ever since.
They revere the ruins like relics, hoping for their resurrection, insatiably enraptured by lost splendor. Something is always missing. The eye sees, the mind completes: fragments become buildings, the deeds of the dead spring to life, more glorious and perfect than ever. It was here, in the Holy City, the capital of history, that the preservation of monuments was first invented and an entire people proclaimed as heirs, when the Roman Senate decided to protect the more than thousand-year-old Doric column erected in honor of Trajan and his victories, in order that it might remain whole and unscathed for as long as the world exists, and to impose the highest punishment on anyone who so much as attempted to cause it harm. Rome has not fallen; the past is not over; it is just that the future has already begun. This place is stuck between ages, between all the architectural styles vying, in this global arena, for the favor of the public who have always flocked here: Romanesque basilicas with triumphal arches sunk in sand, medieval gables with the facades of Baroque churches, pale Renaissance villas with sooty pyramids—an enormous, tangled organism composed of dead and living matter, governed by chance and necessity and the law of the sun.
No barrier separates the ruins from the miserable working lives of their occupants, who do not stand in awe, but live as they would anywhere else: half-naked beggars loitering in arcades; fishmongers hawking their perishable wares in the shade of a bricked-up portico; women washing their linen in ancient thermal baths; shepherds cramming their sheep into dank temples, where the one-time sacrificial animals graze at the foot of pagan altars; day laborers salvaging blocks of porous, yellowish-white travertine from the catacombs of the Flavian Amphitheater, where the bones of wild animals and unshakable Christians lie. Anything serviceable is used for construction or shipped. Trade in spolia is flourishing. The ruins are pure capital: not treasures to be recovered, but semiprecious minerals to be extracted, just like copper from the Alban Hills.
Few are concerned about the preservation of the Roman ruins, certainly no one as passionate and combative as Giovanni Battista Piranesi, originally of Venice, who falls out with anyone who offers him encouragement or affection. So it almost verges on the miraculous that this man, who prefers the company of stones to that of human beings, in his thirty-third year finds a wife who tolerates him and bears him five children, even though he invests the whole of her not inconsiderable dowry in a massive hoard of copper plates. Besides his tendency to be quarrelsome and irascible, the tall man with the smoldering dark eyes is also given to single-minded devotion and self-sacrifice, and the person who claimed that even a quarter of an hour in his company would make you ill has missed what it is that truly ails the choleric type with the clouded brow: the ruins speak to him as if in a fever, rob him of his peace and sleep, constantly evoke images, visions, which he thinks he has to capture in order to prove wrong any future generations and ignoramuses who dare to claim that ancient Greek art was superior to Roman. Besotted like a man in love, he blames the vacuousness of the present, whose pitiful naivety, as he declares in pamphlet after pamphlet, is enough to drive anyone familiar with the immense grandeur of the past to despair. And Piranesi is familiar with it, has beheld it, for the ancients have populated his dreams ever since, as a child, he read about it in the annals of a Roman historian, in the living room—bathed as it was in the shimmering light of the lagoon—of his uncle, an engineer, whose job it was to maintain the defenses designed to keep the intrusive Adriatic Sea at bay.
And since the present, coral-like, always colonizes that which is sinking, his not old but already ponderous body is magnetically drawn into the depths, into the bowels of the Earth, into the underground vaults and catacombs, out to the sunken burial sites by the main thoroughfares beyond the city gates, whence the ancient Romans had banished their dead, since there was nothing on Earth they feared more than Pluto’s underworld. There they had erected necropolises for them, which now held only the ashes of the deceased, ever since countless wars had taught them that cremation alone prevents the corpses from being defiled by the enemy.
So Piranesi hacks his way, with ax and flaming torch, through the undergrowth and darkness, lights fires to ward off snakes and scorpions, wrapped in a black cloak, bathed in moonlight like a figure from some nineteenth-century novel. With pickax and spade he digs his way into the earth, uncovers plinths and sarcophagi, measures the fortifications of old defensive structures and the buttresses and piers of weather-beaten bridges, examines masonry bonds and the order of columns, studies facades and foundations, deciphers the i
nscriptions on ancient sepulchers, copies the fluting on columns and the moldings on arches, sketches the ground plans and elevations of buried predator cages and theater arenas, the cross sections and longitudinal sections of forts and theological colleges choked with vegetation—and draws with a restless hand the levers and beams, the hooks and chains, the pivots and brackets that were needed to construct those formidable structures. For him no stone is so mute, no masonry so brittle, no truncated column so damaged that he would not recognize in them the limbs and muscles that once formed the strapping body of this city, and the blood vessels and organs that once supplied it: bridges and arterial roads, aqueducts and water reservoirs, and in particular the many-branching channels of the labyrinthine Cloaca Maxima, which, although or indeed because it served the basest of needs, he names as the pinnacle of all architecture, whose glory, in his judgment, surpasses even the Seven Wonders of the World. And just as the anatomist Vesalius a century earlier dismembered the still warm corpses of condemned murderers on the dissecting table, so he does with the dilapidated buildings, remnants of a past empire which, to his mind, was not to blame for its demise.
From the eloquent ruins, the architect, who his whole life long will never build a single house, sketches the ground plan of an imagined past and simultaneously the vision of an entirely new creation which, in his copperplate etchings, captivates more people than any building anchored to solid ground. His gaze effortlessly penetrates sediment and other material as, in his workshop, he bends over the cold, smooth-polished metal and copies the impermanent red chalk sketches onto the etching ground, an infinite number of dashes, dots and flicks, patchy shapes and vibrating lines that seldom intersect, even though they change direction with every detail as if setting out on a new course. He immerses the plate in the bath and, with each repetition, covers some areas and gives others a drizzling, so that the acid still eats into the slightest hollow and captures forever what he does not want to forget, what he cannot forget.
An Inventory of Losses Page 7