Two cold sparks shot out from the antennas of the FR and FL trams as they crossed on the Via del Mare, one the color of grenadine, the other of a mint ice. For a moment, two phosphorescent shadows gleamed against the asphalt, sweeping over the throng of waiting passengers like the wing of a blind angel.
The two phantoms, one scarlet and one emerald green, were rendered geometrical by the marvelously Euclidean air of the Via del Mare, where the ruins, illuminated by reflectors, wallowed in empty space with an air of comfort, amplitude, and equilibrium that seemed more celestial than geometric. They met at a precise moment which was fixed by the arms of the clock: September 14, 1950, 9:05 PM.
The commuters traveling toward Porta Metronia or the Piazzale Flaminio, whose identities have been extinguished in the normal course of business and human contact by an unthinkable excess of presence, actuality, and nature, calmly perceived the presence of the two electric beings which had fulminated them at that precise, abstract moment of their lives: “9:05 PM, a night in 1950.” They were only slightly brighter than the reflectors that bathed the arches, buttresses, and colonnades in a pool of sterilized light. These were elemental colors, pure tints extracted from the rainbow by an optical illusionist for his experiments, spirits iridescent as soda pop, shooting over the Chagallian composition of passengers, trolley buses, and ruins; a flash of Bonichian14 magnesium which reduced the space to cubes, spheres, etc…a masterpiece of enchanting, abstract hypotheses. Five minutes pass…not more than five minutes…and now the chill of those two angelic shudders, red and green, has been absorbed without a trace by the Via del Mare. In five minutes, it has aged, blindly chasing time, immersed in a new, unthinkable, mortal present.
The Forum, an enormous sequence marked by a slowness that borders on fixedness, is blasted by a sun which does not even produce warmth, a morning sun still slightly tinged with a fragrance of cabbage—fragile, ardent, vaporous. The pale, smoky red to rust-yellow-colored air, furrowed by the rays of light, like a provincial parlor in the early morning, while the maids dust the furniture; or like a late baroque drawing, perhaps with a greenish-pink hue above the sepia and green markings of the pen, introduces an element of romantic, meteorological disorder, between the intent gazes of the tourists and the piled, scattered stones below….
The anthill is deserted.
But in the purity of this day, the stupendous traveling shot of panoramic views ends at the side of the Campidoglio, soaked in sunlight, spraying sun, hardened under the sun: Gogol, Goethe, Stendhal, Seneca, Gide…what florid prose! The onlooker’s eyelashes are dried out by the light, his stomach acidic, and his fingers swollen: but the surface of the brain is exposed like a negative by the perfect, fragmented architecture….
Workmen, their souls more closely woven than their Sunday trousers, merchants and elderly shopkeepers: faces, rendered stupid by good health. There are 35 thousand of them in the stadium. They exhale their romanesco15 with collective sighs as powerful as roars. This is their obsession. A small red aircraft weaves elliptically around the stadium, dragging a huge banner, flapping in the wind, advertising Linetti brilliantine. All these potential inhabitants of the Regina Coeli prison, gray as cheap fabric, and as beautiful as suns, carry their yellow-and-red16 team books in their pockets. These are the same people who at the age of twelve scrawled obscenities on the walls, thus sublimating their deadly exaltation.
Time is pulverized like odorless naphthalene, a greenish veil over the only slightly brighter rough, fresh green of the trees along the Lungotevere,17 above the yellow-red of the water’s surface, and the first colors of the evening streaking down here and there from the bitter, dazed sky; it disappears into thin air with a slight puff of air. You hear someone say “okay,” see a fragment of a Camel, yellow paper blowing around in the breeze at a street corner, a cabbage leaf rolling around the sidewalk, and that Roman night in 1947 returns to you bathed in a vague odor of fennel and rocket. The trees along the Tiber, their delicate green covering dissolved by the sensual, fossilized, and oily vibrations of light, tremble again in an authentic breeze, in the body of the breeze that the Sunday afternoon weather reports have captured and filed away at birth, fresh as algae, in the Central Apennines or the Tyrrhenian Sea, the origin of long, wondrous meteorological concatenations leading toward Russia, the Baltic, and Sirte. Thousands of percussion instruments breathed, moaned, and laughed, beyond the light blue and lilac colored incrustations of the Roman landscape, beyond urban views as intense as flower beds beneath the Pincio or the Janiculum hill, around archeological remains or distant volcanoes, behind the torturous, baroque, oiled and marble-like instants, beyond rows of peripheral plants with the odor of earthenware pots and small gardens blackened by saltpeter and solitude, behind the sky-blue curves of a festive, communal Tiber; among the sighs, and shouts, and laughter (sometimes nearby, at other times vertiginously far away, from other, even more joyful neighborhoods) the Roman youths, still adolescents, laughed as they walked along the river, their cheeks caressed by the vivid evening breeze.
La Libertà d’Italia, Rome, January 9, 1951. “Squarci di notti romane” (“Excerpts from Roman Nights”), in Alí degli Occhi Azzurri (Alì of the Blue Eyes), Garzanti, Rome 1965. The original text that appeared in the newspaper has sections that were eliminated in the version that appeared in the book.
14 Gino Bonichi (1904–33), was a painter who founded the Roman School, an expressionist movement (ex. The Roman Courtesan, 1930).
15 A combination of accent, vocabulary, and expressions that make up the Roman dialect.
16 The colors of the Roma football team.
17 The Lungotevere are the streets that run along the Tiber River in Rome.