OBERTO GILI
SQUARES OF ROME AND VENICE: THE SHADOW OF IDEAS: CIRCLES AND SQUARES
Se non è vero, è molto ben trovato.
—Giordano Bruno
PIAZZA DELLA MADONNA DEI MONTI. THERE THE MORNING SUN gives us preferential treatment, casting the church and half the fountain into shadow, striking us instead at our usual table. I have my integrale, you have your spremuta, the dog is leaping at the waiters, and I am very proud of this little clutch of italicized Italian words, I am reading La Repubblica, very slowly, with a dictionary, but very proud. Sometimes people stop and speak to us in this Italian square, using the tu form, because we are young or youngish, or known to them, or both. We live in Rome, but I am a tourist. I never stop being one, particularly in the squares. I remained a tourist even in that little square, the one I burned down. Which fire was at the beginning, though in memory it comes at the end, and this is inconvenient, structurally. But my memories of our Italian squares are nonsequential, they jump from here to there, ignoring chronology. They are filed according to a variety of intimate systems—one of which involves the differing intensities of light—and so there is nothing to be done: We begin in Piazza della Madonna dei Monti, east of the river, not far from the Colosseum. You are reading the financial pages, like a local, whereas I am wondering about Vivaldi, like a tourist. I am aware that a performance of the Four Seasons is to happen in a basilica somewhere, at five-thirty each weekday afternoon and twice on Saturday; I hate that I should know about it, but I do. Even if I don’t pick up the soggy flyer, stained by coffee rings and sprinkled with tobacco shreds, I register the invitation, knowing that it’s meant for the likes of me, for the ordinary tourist, although I am quick to agree when you say, “No fucking way, those things are awful. Plus, Vivaldi is awful.” You bend down to pour a little Pellegrino on the dog’s panting face. The short waiter approaches, the one without any beauty, though he is furbo, he watches everybody, we always leave a euro to stay on his good side. He approaches and the dog leaps up. I yank her lead and pin her stupid head between my ankles. In England this would be considered the right thing to do, but in that Italian square, dogs are beloved and free to wander about by themselves, their leads trailing behind them, while their owners have coffee or buy a dress or whatever. The waiter looks with great sympathy at the dog, the dog stopped being a tourist some time ago; now everybody pities her for being stuck with us. He clears the cups as we look down at the table in silence. Once he has gone we can continue arguing in English. We don’t like to speak English in public. The fact that we speak English is for some reason a terrible secret no one in Rome must ever know.
“I just think we should go and see some music sometime.”
“Yeah, fine, but not bloody Vivaldi.”
It was 2007, or thereabouts. It was probably ten-thirty in the morning. The day lay wide open before us. We would be almost fifty before we saw many more days like that one—but how were we to know that? We lived in pure possibility. The pound was strong. We were laying down memories—mainly of Italian squares—and I was filled with a kind of preemptive nostalgia. Why should we go to the basilica when we could do anything? We had no children, we were two youngish writers in an Italian square, we might walk perfectly unencumbered through the city from square to square, never worrying about bottles of milk or the location of changing tables, as contented under an Italian sky as Keats ever was, more so, as we were both entirely free of tuberculosis. The dog was no handicap, we could take her anywhere, into churches, butchers, the post office, restaurants. We were free! In memory, freedom is obvious. In the present moment it’s harder to appreciate or recognize as a form of responsibility. Anyway, with my freedom I did very little, almost nothing. You, at least, read the financial news (and were consequently less surprised by what followed). I only walked from square to square, often mopey, even a little bored, oblivious, waiting for something to happen.
NOW WE MOVE ACROSS TOWN, FARTHER WEST. THERE GOES THE usual Vivaldi flyer, unpeeling itself from whichever basilica, blowing through the cobbled streets to Campo de’ Fiori, and ending up, I was intending to write, “slicked to the hem of Giordano Bruno’s cloak,” but Google Images says I am a liar, or a tourist with an indifferent memory: Bruno stands on a plinth at least twelve feet in the air. I peel it off the base, then, while you read the inscription.
“‘To Bruno’”—you are translating—“‘the century he predicted. Here is where the fire burned.’ Here,” you add, “and over there.” You point to the square where we used to live, a few streets away, before I burned it down.
“But I survived my fire.”
“Well, to be fair, you weren’t tied to a stake.”
“Giordano got lucky! I’ve got problems Giordano never had!”
“Of course.”
“Like what to do with the rest of my life.”
“Right, because Giordano had it easy compared to you. You’ve got writer’s block. Whereas he was just burned at the stake for speaking truth to power.”
“Listen, it was all over for him in a couple of minutes. Existential ennui lasts forever.”
SOME TIME PASSED. NOW WE WERE IN VENICE, IN PIAZZA SAN Marco, the water was rising. It was during the Biennale—everyone’s fancy shoes were ruined. Rain pounded on the white decks of the yachts, rain slid off the basilicas. It rained until the square itself became a giant swimming pool through which the international art crowd did wade. Cigarettes floated by, and empty bottles of Peroni, and wraps of cocaine, no doubt, and some sheik’s daughter. I took off my shoes and lifted my skirts, hugely pregnant, head-wrapped: I felt I was reenacting ancient memories of a West African ancestor, heavy with child, crossing a river, except I was not seeking food or shelter or a dry place to give birth, I was just trying to get to a party on the other side of the canal, in the empty house of a banker. His son was having the party; it seemed to be happening without the banker’s knowledge. We paused beneath the colonnades. Here, the previous day, we had paid twenty-one euros for orange juice, twelve euros of which turned out to be a music surcharge: Someone nearby was playing a violin. And here, now, stood an artist, and her husband, a filmmaker, they were also seeking shelter under the arches, they were also up to their ankles in water. We were all exactly the same age. Youngish. Not so young. The day before we had visited Il Giardino delle Vergini, a natural Italian square, a piazza-shaped hillock covered with grass and fringed with flowers, to see the artist’s installation, it was called Eleven Heavy Things. We stood behind a series of large white slabs—they looked like stone tablets—and each had a hole you could put your head through so that the inscription referred, at that moment, to you. We took turns standing on three empty plinths: The Guilty One, The Guiltier One, or The Guiltiest One. It was an Italian square and we, the people, were the statuary. I put my head through a sign that said: What I look like when I really mean it. I put my head through a sign that said: What I look like when I’m lying. Now we stood with the artist herself in the colonnade, hiding from the rain, and discussed our time of life, the question of children, the rain, and the quayside yachts that seemed bigger than I’d ever seen them, they looked like an invading force, and yet only nine months earlier, if memory served, Lehman had capsized. How could something so large go under, on the other side of the Atlantic, without sending the slightest ripple this way? But these yachts were unperturbed. They looked like permanent installations.
The rain began to ease. We waded through San Marco and got on a vaporetto packed with art hipsters, heaving with linen tote bags. We looked back at the scene, at the square of St. Mark’s, at the Tintoretto lights. Four hundred years earlier, Giordano Bruno, who had been lecturing abroad, found himself tempted back to Italy by an invitation: to teach his Art of Memory right here in Venice. But when he arrived, he was immediately betrayed, perhaps in this very square, and turned over to the Inquisition. You can find his memory techniques in a little book called De Umbris Idearum, in which Bruno demonstrates how to memorize anything—long lists of facts, speeches, languages, histories—by attaching to whatever subject you want to recall certain referents of personal force, which he calls “adjects.” An adject is simply a strong image that comes easily to your mind. It can come from life, from literature, nature, anywhere: “Those things to make the heart pound, having the power of something wondrous, frightening, pleasant, sad; a friend, an enemy, horrible, abominable, admirable, prodigious; things hoped for or which we are suspicious of, and all things that encroach powerfully on the inner emotions—bring these to bear.” Of course, Bruno was burned for more important heresies, but his memory system is especially interesting to me: heretical not only in content but also in form. For a Brunoesque memory bypasses collective official memory and ignores chronology, and it’s the opposite of ritual, which is the guise memory takes on within religion. It’s a radically subjective way of remembering, in which the real and the fictional, the personal and historical, can all be combined. Still, it was very foolish of Bruno to come back to Venice to talk about memory at that fraught historical moment, although you see exactly how it happened. Venice is beautiful, seductive. If someone invites you to the Biennale, for example, you can’t resist it, you go for the beauty and get stuck. As we began to cross the canal, I got a glimpse of that fancy hotel the art crowd favors, the Bauer l’Hotel, just off the square, where a few nights earlier we had seen and heard a man holding up a bottle of vodka, laughing, announcing: “Twenty minutes ago this was a hundred euros—now it’s two hundred!” It was the summer of 2009. It was the last days of Rome. Except this time, as the empire fell, there remained a class of people who did not feel in any way weakened; on the contrary, they appeared emboldened, engorged, stronger than ever. Next to me sat a young man who had heard what was said; I noticed him wince. We started talking. He was genuinely young, our knees were touching; there was a strange intensity to the way we spoke, perhaps because we were from the same class and corner of London. Conversation flowed and quickly became intimate, he told me that ten years earlier, still in his teens, unhappy at school, gay, isolated, he had become obsessed with contemporary art, he had no money at all but he knew that looking at art was all he wanted to do, and he sensed he had taste, or at least “knew what he liked,” and so he began attending all the degree shows, going to anything free, befriending artists, especially artists who felt as he did at the time—abject, alone, out of place—and he became devoted to them, and many of them returned his affection, they became involved in each other’s lives, and in the end people began to give him pieces, and for years he never sold a single one, even when these artists became world-famous, he kept it all in his collection, hanging or installed in a tiny flat in Swiss Cottage. (Meanwhile the international contemporary art market boomed. Meanwhile a piece of contemporary art from a blue-chip gallery came to seem one of the safest investments in the world.) And when I did begin to sell some things, he said, I only ever sold to buy more, all I wanted was beauty, I just wanted beauty in my life, maybe it was all because of my older brother—he mentioned this as if it had only just occurred to him—my beloved brother, he took a single ecstasy pill and died, and yes, thinking about it, maybe it was his death that made me want beauty so much, want it above all else, to really crave it, actually. The young man stopped talking and picked up his drink. We were drawn into the general conversation at the table, and unfortunately I didn’t get to speak to him again. I’ve been to a few art fairs since, but that was the only real conversation about art I ever had at one.
SIMON WATSON/Trunk Archive, Piazzetta di San Marco, Venice
IN PIAZZA NAVONA ON A VERY HOT DAY, WE SAT ON THE IRON barrier around a fountain, dipping the dog in the water, and watching the Guardia di Finanza chase a group of African bag sellers past one Bernini fountain, then past the fountain we sat on, which was designed by Giacomo della Porta but to which Bernini made a late, great addition. They were awfully fancy-looking, those guards: Their uniforms were closely fitted and light gray, with belts and epaulettes, and they had little gold buttons and jaunty green berets and a gold medallion on the beret, and you could tell that in their opinion none of this was even remotely funny. Off they went, in hot pursuit. They had sworn a holy oath to protect the brand purity of Prada and Fendi and Moschino and the rest, and defend their country’s sacred right to produce overpriced leather goods in the Tuscan hills. The guards never seemed to catch up with the Africans, but the sight of their chase through the city became as familiar to us as a priest man-splaining to a group of nuns or a taxi driver swearing at a cyclist. Having no purpose, as I have mentioned above, we tended to spend our days wandering from square to square, but these Africans—they ran. And on this occasion they ran right by us, and one came so close that his big fabric sack—made of a knotted bedsheet and filled with counterfeits—knocked my knee. I saw him look back to see what had almost upended him, and for a moment his profile came in line with the profile of Bernini’s late edition, the Moor, who stands in a conch shell in the center of the fountain. It reminded me of one of those accidental acts of mirroring between art and nature of which Nabokov makes so much. The African ran on. The Moor stayed. I stayed, looking up at the Moor, admiring him. He is a Moor full of purpose, wrestling a dolphin, every muscle alert and straining. Most people who pass him think he is Neptune, understandably, because of that dolphin, but no, in fact he is a Moor, not in the literal sense of being a Berber Muslim, he is one of those decorative Negroes common in Renaissance art, and looking up at him, I had a strange feeling. I saw myself as some kind of a decorative Moor, the kind who does not need to wrestle dolphins or anything else, a Moor of leisure, a Moor who lunches, a Moor who needn’t run for her livelihood through the public squares. A historically unprecedented kind of Moor. A late-capitalism Moor. A tourist Moor. The sort of Moor who enters a public square not to protest or to march (or, in an earlier age, to be hanged or sold) but simply to wander about without purpose. A Moor who has come to look at the art. A Moor who sits on the lip of a fountain and asks herself: “What, if anything, is the purpose of the artist today?” A Moor with the luxury of doing that.
IN PIAZZA SFORZA CESARINI THE PROBLEM WAS A HALOGEN bulb; it was extremely hot and built into a bookcase. Perhaps the page of a book had strayed over it, or the corner of a cushion, I’ll never know. I was due in New York the next morning for a reading in Brooklyn, my bag was packed, my dog was fed, my passport was in my back pocket, and then a friend phoned and said, “Why not come for one last drink,” and I said yes, and thought, I’ll leave the dog, no, I’ll take the dog, no, I’ll leave the dog, but the dog came on heavy with the guilt trip and the sad eyes, so at the last minute I brought the dog, and lucky for the dog, for otherwise she’d be dead. I went out for half an hour. You were in Washington, reading poetry aloud. You say I burned the square down, but a person doesn’t leave a halogen light on for half an hour and expect an Italian square to burn down. And I didn’t burn the entire square, only one building, though it’s true that for two years afterward, while they rebuilt the facades, the square effectively disappeared, to be replaced by huge sheets painted with a trompe l’oeil—itself a sort of adject: a memory of the square as it once had been.
I didn’t see the fire until I was quite far up the stone steps. Actually, even at the door I didn’t see it, I only felt it: the heat and the smoke. I got to the window of the communal hallway and searched my memory for the word for fire. “Incendio!” I cried. (This is something like leaning out a New York window and screaming: “Conflagration!”) People looked up, but nobody moved. The dog was screaming. I opened our door to look for what might be saved. I reached out for my laptop: burned my fingers, dropped it. But there was no novel in there, only many photographs of the dog. In the background I could see my clothes were already gone, and the suitcase that had contained them, all books and family photographs, the phone, the fridge, all furniture, every knife, fork, and spoon. I understood at last what it means to have money. By then it was seven years since I’d had some money, but the day of the fire was the first time I understood what it had done to me. The terror at the cashpoint, the anxiety in the supermarket, the argument at the bank teller’s desk, the family-five-alarm row because someone has left a light on, because someone thinks “we have shares in the electricity company”*—all of that, all of the daily battle with money, was over. When money’s scarce life is a daily emergency, everything is freighted with potential loss, you feel the smallest misstep will destroy you. When there’s money, it’s different, even a real emergency never quite touches you, you’re always shielded from risk. You are, in some sense, too big to fail. And when I looked at my life on fire, I had a thought I don’t believe any person in the history of my family—going back many generations on both sides—ever could have had or ever think of having: Everything lost can be replaced. Yes, in the history of my clan, it was an unprecedented thought. And what will happen, I thought, if my future children grow up with this idea, not as a revelation but as part and parcel of their natural inheritance? What if this idea were to be embedded in them at birth, like a genetic memory, which they then passed on to their children, who passed it to their children in turn, and onward and upward, into the next century and beyond? These future descendants—what kind of people would they be? How would the world look to them? What would they choose to remember? What would they choose to forget?
I grabbed the real dog and ran downstairs. Outside was a very Roman scene. Everyone had gathered to watch an incendio in the public square; they were having a ball. The firemen were coming but in no great hurry. The kindly waiters of Luigi’s gave the dog water and tried to stop her screaming, but the dog was completely hysterical, she seemed aware of the loss of her digital archive and to be taking it personally. Finally the Vigili del Fuoco turned up in outfits almost as dashing as those of their friends in the Guardia di Finanza. They put the fire out, established that no one was dead or wounded, and when I asked what if anything was left, they shook their heads sadly: “Tutto distrutto.” Our first and last Italian square. Ashes. I turned to the firemen. I begged to be let in. The firemen said, “No, no, it’s not safe.” I begged some more. The firemen looked at each other, sighed, and said, “Va bene.” Only in Rome. As I climbed the stairs, I remembered a line from an old Negro spiritual: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water but the fire next time.” I entered the ruins of our apartment. I inhaled enough smoke to keep me coughing for several days. And they were right, it was all gone, your things, my things, your life, my life, it was our own little financial crash, that is, until I went around the corner and found your book still sitting there, it was in the laundry loft, that dark corner where you worked—you’d had the foresight to print it all out on paper—and there it remained, on your chair (also preserved) under a picture of the Madonna, to whom, in respect of a miracle, the firemen took off their hats.
OBERTO GILI