|
Descent I never made it to Munich. My dad had told me stories of Bavaria, brought back little porcelain dolls and carved wooden girls with puppy dogs from his business trips. I have two German childrens books on my shelf one a collection of ghost stories, the other the adventures of a clumsy, but well-meaning elf trying to help Santa through the twelve days of Christmas. Except he keeps blowing up the workshop or accidentally dropping Santa in the lake, but Santa is really quite good natured about it all, so the ending is quite happy; Christmas happens. I imagined German beer and hospitality as I sat at the Forum eating pizza and some wonderful fried pasta cheese ball. In Rome, they sell fast-food by the kilo. The shop was next door to the bus station, two doors down from the ticket office (eight euros to change my outbound destination), across the street from the Metro. The men inside were loud and smelly, and when I had asked if I could take their picture, they had erupted into giddy laughter, flattered and intrigued by the American girl who takes pictures of cheap pizza joints and their greasy chefs. I lit a cigarette. I didnt smoke before that summer, but traveling does that. You wrench yourself away from your own world, and you pull and pull and everything gets all tight what you knew and know and used to be and who you are and then a snap, and that tether is gone. America, and family, became distant concepts, separated by more than an ocean and people. Cigarettes become essential. Theyre cheaper than food and they have antidepressants, as well as stimulants to keep you awake on the three day bus rides so you can watch your stuff and make sure you leave with approximately the amount you came with. I learned to ration them, smoking only half of a cigarette at a time. I learned how to patch a broken cigarette together, holding your fingers the right way, so when the cheap ones from Amsterdam split in half, you can still smoke them. I watched the smoke catch in the wind, swirling upwards with the dust spiraling around the broken marble columns. Almost everything in the Forum is red Roman brick, but there are patches of marble flashing through, just the straight, tall columns remaining from a temple or patrician mansion. There was one tree. It was tall, its branches leaping outwards thirty feet up, arms outstretched over the ruins. I wouldnt want to be the tree, hovering there above a crumbling villa, forced to stare at the grove to the north, stretch its arms out, but never have anyone else to talk to. At least the columns were reconstructed in groups of threes and fours. I walked along the guardrail above the Senate chambers, imagining Antonys speech, the triumvate, bread and circuses, Caesars death. The wind leapt down, over the guardrail, into the hollow, echoing up whispers of dust and concave sound; it whistled over the empty plain, cries of you as well, screams of shocked recognition, betrayal, resignation rolling low over the fallen columns; it crept, murmuring, through the back galleries, out the back doors, down the back alleys, once dark and covered, wet, dank, and home to the homeless Epicureans and glittering knife stabs like flashing Jupiters laughing thunder, now exposed and warm like dry bone of a dead empire. But the wind Rome never died. It slowly spread over the years, seeping (like the slow creeping percolation of ink spilled on paper, leaching into the veins, coagulants mingling with contemporaries, a network of colonies and tributaries feathering outwards) into the cultures it touched, fingering its way through the root systems of Europe and Anatolia, until the world was choked and saturated in it. The Pantheon, and capitalism, confirms it. The Pantheon is about a mile from the Vatican, across the river. It used to be a Roman temple. Now it houses Catholic weddings and American tour groups. Theres a hole in the roof the imperfection of the Roman dome, incomplete without the cupola; they were forced to build it with that open ring at the top holding the arch together, the weight dispersed evenly among the keystones. But they invented concrete, soon, and their methods improved. The Pantheon remains as a reminder of early Roman engineering. The hole was never covered. It still rains through the roof, and the drains in the floor still divert the water away into a culvert which runs under the streets of the city. The dome is massive. The hole is probably forty feet across, if not more, but a reasonable estimate is hard to get, as the roof is so high above. The curving ceiling and the crenellated walls skew perception until the building seems to stretch around you and pull away. A single observer is dwarfed. Its construction is simple, and immense. The decorations of the Roman Catholics detract from it, drag the ceiling down towards eye level; the ornate flourishes and censers ruin this cenotaphs silent memory of an ancient empire, the vastness gone and only heaviness remaining, as the bricks and aqueducts still stand but the feet and mouths lost and dead. It is easy to see why the Romans rejected the Greek scale of beauty. The power of the building makes me want to cry, my voice lost in a room of echoes, and admit my frailty as a single human. The modern trappings ensure that only this despair lingers. I watched the storm begin to start. Lightening splintered through the columns, the friction heavy and hot in the dry air. I tried to capture it on a camera I had bought in a shop across the street from my hotel. I had motioned to the one in the window, asking the price. Five euros. I nodded. The lady behind the counter smiled, and her husband came over to take my credit card. She loaded the batteries into the camera, cranked the advance wheel, flashed it at me. We both smiled and laughed childishly. Film two euros roll. Her husband leaned forward, handing me a box with generic Italian film, his cheap gold chains clanking against the glass countertop. I nodded, holding up three fingers. Tre. The couple looked at me, and, in a sudden burst of laughter, called the other man over to look at me. All three stared at my hand, their dark eyes focused on my fingers. Tre, the woman exclaimed, bending her pinkie and ring finger downwards. Tre. The rain began to fall, slowly at first, then fast, hard and heavy. The lightening continued to flash, and I imagined I could catch it, get the exact moments when the electrons ripped through the air behind the columns. I ran through the Forum, following trails around the ruins, trying to find the best place to view the storm, the best background for the beginning of my photographic career. I reached the northern edge of the park, a small opening in a copse of trees with a panoramic view of the new city. The lightening flashed behind the basilica, and I imagined myself famous. I imagined catching the second it drove itself downwards into the (complete) dome of the Popes chapel, the sharp crack of the thunder drowning the splintering of wood and metal and the sad rumble of masonry as the Vatican collapsed and Rome regained its ancient gods. I imagined the impossible rebirth of an empire that had never died, but was only permutated into modern society. I rewound the film, my roll empty, and slowly walked down the hill toward the Coliseum, past the tourists huddled under the cypresses, ignoring the peddlers suddenly pawning umbrellas, their voices getting slowly more frantic as the sudden shower began to end. The Coliseum shouldnt have been so famous. All the death, and violence, and the historic blood the people imagine as they walk around with those little speakers pressed to their ears (10 euros, only. Hear the grand history of the Olympics and the Coliseo.), or the movies they recreate in their minds as they follow the college students who tour for tips all that was only the violent distraction of an empire; they moved the throne down to the bottom of a hill and pretended that the true politics lay in a quavering thumb, and that they could appease all of their past ghosts who haunt them on the eve of battle by enacting play-war and killing their proverbial enemies. So the Senators began to buy houses on the western side of the city, so their slaves didnt have to carry them as far to work, and, instead of debating, they learned to boo and bet. And, instead of a republic, Rome became an empire. I shouldnt have been there that day I should have been in Barcelona, heading towards Munich, visiting the colonies, the ancient patrician duty. But goddamned karma. I had insulted the Pope, argued with his guards; I suppose lightening is too dramatic and cliché in this day and age. God, and the Popes lackeys, employs more subtle methods than the old-school mass death and terror. But still, I thought, standing in the upper levels of the Coliseum, theres something to be said for being thrown to the lions. All that hiding and those secret pacts, and then a stoical scream as a tortured animal tears you to pieces for a political spectacle. It has a nice climax to it. I had gone underground (like an ancient Christian, before the beliefs had become convenient and political and lovely pretend), to the modern catacombs, where the skeletons of empty and ruined travelers cried sobs drowned by the feet of the city and the wail of the metro. A nice lady (not Italian, but Lebanese) stopped, held my hand, led me to the police. They had been politely disinterested a robbed tourist was nothing exceptional and had given me a list of phone numbers and a copy of the police report. Get a new passport, the man at the embassy had said on the phone, unable (or unwilling) to comprehend penniless a poor Virgil trapped in the Purgatory of the state department. I caught a bus back to my hostel. I found a seat for myself in the corner, by the window, my bags tucked close around me. I examined my souvenirs, the cheap scarves and flags I had bought from the Asian vendors outside the Coliseum. I looked out the window as the bus drove through the city, and noticed the bright rainbow pace flags hanging everywhere: from balconies, from windows, across doorways. We passed one apartment house that was covered in them, every window waving a flag brightly shouting peace. The mama fussed over me that night, washed my clothes and made me food. I had been checked in by her son, but he was gone for the evening. We watched telenovelas on the TV in the kitchen, smoking cigarettes and smiling in Italian. She was a little lady, short and round, and would duck her head like a pigeon-bob, shyly grinning, when I smiled at her, or said gratzi with my Spanish inflection. We had whole conversations of smiles. I watched the street below, that night, smoking a cigarette from my window on the fifth floor. The building was an old one, like in the movies, with the gate for the elevator, and a grand, heavy, carved door. Below my window, there was a café, and I watched Romans sit with wine and coffee, laughing and talking, their voices rising upwards in the dark. A car drove up, some people got out, somebody laughed, and it sounded like my sister. Further off in the night a dog barked, slowly, once, twice, then fell quiet. The moon rose silently over the apartments, and, across the street, the pace flag in the window fluttered with a soft whisper that reminded me of Latin, and the dying sigh of an emperor. back |