Life Embitters (56 page)

He rang an architect’s office at nine and had a document drawn up to the effect that the house he inhabited had been threatening to collapse. An hour later, at ten, he walked into Prince Colonna’s administrative offices and half an hour later came out beaming. The count had just earned three thousand lire, the first tangible fruit of the catastrophe to which he almost fell victim. With that first tranche he began to feel free of immediate stress, and devoted most of his time to public libraries researching the jurisprudence related to his case from the Twelve Tables onwards. His wife had the good sense to understand her husband’s thinking and didn’t rush to leave hospital. There’s nothing like good character and pleasant manners to help prolong one’s stay in a charitable institution. The countess was endowed with these virtues and her totally imaginary ills were respected most benignly. Colonna’s administrator, terrified by the possibility of litigation, paid out a decent amount of lire every month. Don Antoni increased his intake of croquettes and small glasses of wine. He added in slices of pink mortadella, small plates
of fresh cucumber and Russian salad, palpable throwbacks to his old life in Ostend. The catastrophe did him proud: he recovered; his ears lost their transparency. In the meantime, plaster from jurisprudence increased daily. But as that pile expanded, the jurisprudence thinned out and began to roam off beam. But that didn’t matter. Good will has always counted more when applying jurisprudence than strict analogies. Most sensibly Count Logotete foresaw that Prince Colonna’s administrator would wake up in a bad temper one day and decide he’d exhausted his humanitarian sentiments. In effect, that was what happened: the administrator called it a day at thirty thousand lire, saying the disaster had been paid for, was over. However, by then Don Antoni had amassed an impressive stack of material. These papers were given over to a lawyer, an enemy of the Colonna household, who possessed dazzling verbal skills. The case began on an impressively combative note.

“Onto the Supreme Court!” bleated Don Antoni.

“Yes! Onto the Supreme Court!” repeated his lawyer in that baritone bass he made his very own.

They embraced tenderly and embarked on their journey to the highest realms of justice.

Thus began a phase of relative prosperity in the life of Don Antoni Logotete – I don’t think I need underline how relative it was – a phase that was very helpful for my own cultural enrichment. If the catastrophe of the plaster slabs and the surprising aftermath hadn’t happened, Don Antoni would never have decided to visit the antiquities of Rome and I would never have had the opportunity to benefit from them. Happenstance rules even our moments of leisure and relaxation.

The past of cities like Rome that have a great future before them doesn’t usually interest the people who are rooted there. Beauty and history,
museums and archaeology represent an element of routine in the life of these individuals, a subject that holds no surprises or interest, mere local news that boosts the self-esteem of the citizenry, but that newspapers only air when there is nothing more lucrative to vent. They are things they leave to foreigners, occasional visitors, and tourists. So many, many people live round the corner from dazzling collections of art, great museums, and have never thought of paying them a visit! The inhabitants of Rome react like that on the grand scale, probably because of the remarkable wealth of the city’s possessions. Notoriously, they have other business on their minds. Foreigners experience something similar: they are extremely curious on the first few days and want to see the lot, then a similar indifference sets in. Nevertheless, blissful are those in Rome or Italy who manage to keep their minds open, their curiosity alert, and their spirits as buoyant as a tourist’s!

Once the court case was begun and begun in a powerful fighting spirit, Don Antoni was swept along by a wave of tourist fancies. After so many months of inner drought, of disasters and calamities when curiosity had to focus on the demands of daily life, this new period opened with great élan and expectations. I don’t know if this was driven by spiritual impulses or the absolutely visible increase in his food supply. It hardly matters. The truth is Don Antoni was in a bountiful mood and suggested we should devote our spare time to a spot of relaxing archaeology. He knew Rome very well, and the archaeological part he preferred was in the center, and that was exactly what I preferred. The Eternal City’s past is so vast and complex that, if you don’t want to lose your way, you must of necessity curb your curiosity. Even so, the possibilities are enormous.

I liked all that part of the city located on the left of the Piazza Venezia when one is looking directly at the monument to Vittorio Emmanuele; from the Piazza to the Coliseum and the entire area dominated by that imposing
mass. At the time the area I’m referring to was one immense pile of ruins where arches in a good state of conservation, like Titus’s, for example, stood out as if it was a real effort. The entire zone was exactly as it was in Goethe’s times, perhaps even in a worse state, because the best preserved monuments had been fenced off with diverse shapes and sizes of wrought iron. Nobody ever painted these fences, the iron had rusted giving the ruins they were protecting a gloomy air – like funereal pantheons bourgeois taste has erected in cemeteries. Natural deterioration and crumbling stone contrasted with the tedious, mass-produced railings. However, that was the only way they had found to ensure the stones were left in peace.

In winter Rome is a colorful city of delicate shades and aromas but in summer, during the day, there is an explosion of grayish white light that is an implacable, monotonous glare. The light seems to suck the color from the venerable stones that are covered with a luminous crust that has the texture of fine sand. It is a sad, dazzling, and explosive light the very whiteness of which induces melancholy. Even on days when a southerly wind blows, the sky is a wan blue diluting into incandescent white. The solitude, the emptiness of the sky, is a constant: any attempt at cloud is reabsorbed in the vast white vault that, dotted with metallic pinpoints of light, shimmers like glistening mica.

That summer, Don Antoni and I strolled through that shapeless agglomeration that would later be crossed by the Passegiata Archeologica: one of the most striking streets in Europe, that most vibrates with intimations of the eternal. We strolled there in the blistering sun and in white, muted moonlight. If it was interesting by day, it was even more so by night. Even a naturalist would have found it interesting.

I don’t remember ever seeing such a concentration of salamanders and lizards like the one populating those venerable walls, arches, and the
inscriptions that Logotete read to me. Those animals lived a wonderful life on the hot stones, among the dry dusty weeds growing in the cracks. There was also the occasional scorpion. Lizards poked their flattened, triangular heads out of holes in the stone. Salamanders ran up and down the columns, played in the corners of pedestals, slept on ashlars that retained the pomp of earlier days …

Now nearly everyone can visit these sites without leaving their means of transport. There are roads to the ruins. Earlier tourists were more longsuffering and generally visited the archaeological areas on foot and equipped with an umbrella. Those pink, orange, or mauve lady’s umbrellas were pretty in the suffocating light of Rome. The gentlemen wore panama hats – that eventually turned brown – and severe light-gray alpaca jackets.

On our strolls we would meet a lot of tourist groups, generally of the Nordic variety, and I say Nordic because with their fair hair and fresh red cheeks they had a family air about them. The ladies inevitably resembled the photograph in the medallions the men wore on their watch chains. Hanging from a waistcoat button, the chain fell in two pompous loops suspended from symmetrical pockets. The watch was on the left and the purse on the right. Not long ago I saw one of these purses made from silver chainmail that looked as if it would last for ever. It made the strangest impact: it looked like an antique object – more prehistoric than a Paleolithic axhead.

They didn’t react immediately, because they came very culturally informed and obsessed by ancient Rome. However, a lady would suddenly blanch, her umbrella would shake between her fingers, and she would shriek instinctively, spontaneously, slightly raising her skirts (they wore bootees in those days), panic spreading all over her face. The lizards and salamanders had been sighted. “Over there, over there!” shouted the frightened lady in Norwegian or Finnish, pointing her finger at the large dark green head of a huge lizard asleep, half in the sun, half in the shade of rocks. Then they got
goose bumps and were astonished because they’d not expected anything of the sort. The Baedecker was a perfect book; the last edition of that famous guide described the state of the cobbles, the more or less dense dust on an avenue, and whether soup in a particular hotel was excellent, good, average, or merely drinkable. What the Baedecker didn’t mention was the presence of so many beasties among the illustrious ruins. If the group included very impressionable ladies, the presence of our slithering friends produced a real outbreak of screaming. The salamanders ran and hid, rustling over dry grass. The lizards opened an eye, retreated slightly, and then shut it again as if dying of bliss. The guides felt duty-bound to provide explanations that were rather pedestrian. “This demonstrates, ladies and gentlemen,” they’d say in rudimentary English, “how inscrutably ancient these ruins are …” Their husbands had to promise they would write to Herr Baedecker, in Leipzig, the moment they were back in the hotel. The fact was that the shock had been too great for them to continue the visit with any profit. “We’ll come back another day,” they said, much to the chagrin of their guides who obviously didn’t care a fig about those little critters. And, eventually, they did return, now better equipped to deal with the archaeological fauna.

Don Antoni, who was a skeptic, was more amused watching such scenes than deciphering mutilated inscriptions or formulating conjectures about quarried stone or heaps of cadaverous rubble.

On summer evenings we used to go to the Greco for coffee, and then we’d head to the ruins via Corso and the Piazza Venezia. It was hot. People were eating ice cream on the terraces in the gallery. Ladies wore light clothes. We sometimes passed a horse-drawn carriage with folk in open shirts, sleeves rolled up, singing songs and playing the mandolin. The glow from the streetlights lit up the golden, roast-chicken color of the stone of the old palaces on Corso. Everyone was sweating slightly and gesticulating languidly. Everyone, if they’d dared, would like to have launched into
passionate song. Everyone was humming some vague tune. Logotete strode on, oblivious to the oppressive Roman night; short and rigid, he wore a stiff, well-ironed collar, a buttoned-up jacket, a bowler hat, and flourished a gleaming walking stick.

At that time of night, we didn’t roam too far into that convulsed scenario of ruins. If it was moonlit, we went over to the monuments surrounded by iron fencing and looked at them as one might observe a caged animal. As their pedestal was lower than the level of the surrounding earth, they were always surrounded by a broad pit. A large number of rats lived – generally safely – in these depressions. The Rome Town Hall maintained a legion of cats on the terrain to exterminate them, or at least to keep them under control. However, the archaeological department cats were extremely moody, and though the rats were often visible and climbed up to touch the fences, they refused to carry out the mission with which they had been charged. “They’re like bureaucrats …” said Don Antoni, with a grin, “they don’t feel like going to the office today.” Sometimes the cats spent the night miaowing mournfully, as if stricken by melancholy nostalgia, and that velvety, finicky sound resonated round moonlit ruins, cadaverous columns, and ghostly arches, with a thrilling timbre. Although he was Greek and knew Greek perfectly, Don Antoni was sensitive to these elemental Romantic explosions. The cats sometimes played games, chased, hissed, and rolled over each other. But there were nights when they did their duty. Then, by the light of a full moon, we witnessed widespread exterminations, fierce battles between cats and rats. On propitious nights, the cats worked into the early hours, with feverish ardor and real rage. On such nights, Don Antoni would unfold the whitest of handkerchiefs, place it delicately on an illustrious stone and sit upon it. I would do likewise. And, smoking our cigarettes, we watched the spectacle.

We walked slowly back late, when the early morning breeze wafted the fresh smell of the pine trees on Pincio towards us. People on Corso were clear-headed, but equally lethargic and drowsy. Groups were gathered around the entrances to the
trattorie
. Inside the Caffé Aragno, waiters, without their waistcoats, were putting chairs on tables like black and white robots. The odd
carrozzella
still passed by, transporting sweaty, red-cheeked people bawling next to young ladies and mandolins.

Time passed. Autumn came. The Pensione Fiorentina, that during the summer had been full to overflowing, was still quite empty in early October. In those first cold days, apart from occasional Italian visitors, only the Viennese lady and two bearded Bulgarian engineers who mixed with no one were left in the house. Ida the chambermaid spent her leisure time smoking cigarettes in my bedroom. Now and then she would intervene brilliantly in the noisy scenes in the courtyard. She loved her country, especially her town: Asti. She coughed a lot. Whenever I looked into her dark blue, deep-set eyes, I thought she looked frail.

On the 14th of October – I will remember the day forever more – I read until one
A.M.
I undressed and got into bed. I couldn’t sleep; I was nervous and chain-smoked nonstop. The clock ticking on the bedside table was driving me mad. I could never sleep on my heart’s side: the slight pressure from the sheet put me on edge: it was an intolerable burden. Whenever I hear my heart, an obsession with death takes over and my imagination considers the possibility I might be buried alive. It may seem pretentious or ridiculous, but that night the anguish and distress provoked by this obsession were exceptional. I got out of bed two or three times. I rubbed my face with eau de cologne. I tried to read the heaviest tome I could find. Finally, exhausted, lips parched, I fell into a deep sleep.