XXIX. PIGEONS

‘Oh, Tonio, how lovely to see you!’

I stared at the ghost with its raisin-like skin and plush slippers. Brevi’s housekeeper was standing in front of me, she’d spruced up her evening dress with a few sequins which flitted about her chest and made me feel slightly dizzy. Her hair was hidden beneath a blue plastic bonnet and behind her left ear, where it had slipped a little, I could see a curler with a strand of hair, as thin as a spider’s web.

‘Wouldn’t you like to each lunch with us?’

I tried to find a way out but then her wrinkly, fleshless hand grabbed mine and pulled me down the hall.

‘Tonio will be eating with us today,’ Gabriella said, pushing me into the dining room. The windows looked out on the garden side of the building which, until now, I’d only guessed might exist behind the grey outer wall. Now, however, I could see into the park-like space. A whole group of white figures emerged, a sandstone nobility: women with pinned hair, monarchs in antiquated dress, between them a water basin, everything battered, weathered and grey. Three steps led up to the piano nobile.

‘Everything is going down the drain,’ Brevi said and smiled tiredly. ‘But, please, have a seat, please,’ he urged while Gabriella spooned lentils out of a pot onto my already overflowing plate. A rainbow of pills surrounded Brevi’s glass.

‘Heart,’ he said, counting. ‘Liver. Kidneys. And this one here, what’s it for?’

‘Cholesterol.’

‘Where is that?’

‘In your arteries, Pippo.’

‘The important thing is that they find their way there. How’s Gramsci coming along, Tonio?’

‘Are you still busy with him?’ Gabriella exclaimed. ‘We’ll never get rid of the communists here,’ she complained. ‘Even in Russia they’ve gone, but here, until yesterday, they were still sitting in the office of the president. Do you know, Tonio, sometimes I think that this country has been run by so many crazies, the people have just grown used to it.’

‘Napolitano is not crazy, cara,’ Pippo said, ‘and he’s no longer a communist.’

‘Come on,’ she snarled. ‘One thousand disabled deputies and this president rules the country alone. Since when has that been democratic?’

‘Democratic!’ Pippo cried out, teetering on his chair. ‘A great way of making all those who do not care about politics one bit forty euros richer every four years. They get as much for donating blood as they do for voting. But you have to consider how much longer the body needs to recover afterwards. After going to vote, I’ve always slept like an infant.’

‘You drink too much out of anger with the results, that’s why you go to sleep.’

‘That’s not true at all!’ Pippo countered.

Gabriella’s chest rose and fell, the sequins blazed. When she shook her head, her hair appeared from under her bonnet like whitecaps.

‘But do have some more, have some more, Anton,’ she said and with that was rushing back in to the kitchen in order to get the roast out of the oven. Brevi leant forward and whispered: ‘You mustn’t misunderstand me. I think as little of electoral fraud as I do of these pills I must take every day. What am I saying? Every hour.’ He let the colourful capsules roll across the tablecloth, then caught them in his palm. ‘What am I supposed to do? I don’t believe in them at all, and yet, without them I would have been dead a long time ago.’

He placed a pill in his mouth and took a sip of water. ‘Oh, and do not think “scruples” is an empty word for me. You can win a democratic election by various means, and if you ask me, none of them are honest any more. Perhaps we did not understand that from the very beginning.’ He put a second pill between his lips, rocked his head and took another sip from his glass. For a while he observed the iridescent bands the crystal cast onto the tablecloth and attempted to shift them with his fingers. ‘It was such a beautiful idea, a democratic Europe,’ he said. ‘But ideas freeze the moment we turn them in to reality. At that point, they simply continue to stand there, cars swerve around them and pigeon droppings fall from their shoulders.’

He nodded and looked out the window, lost in thought. For a while we sat next to each other in silence, observed the martyred sandstone heads out in the garden and I almost dozed off it was so still.

‘Did you adjust the temperature in the oven, Pippo?’ Gabriella called from the kitchen.

‘Why should I have?’ he murmured and finally looked back at me. ‘Did you have a look through Tania’s flat?’

‘I was—’ I began and broke off. A thin cat scurried through the back courtyard, pigeons cooed in the palm tree.

‘I was close by.’

‘Close by? What do you mean by that?’

I poked at my lentils; Gabriella made noises in the kitchen.

‘Have you ever been to Moscow, Anton?’ Brevi asked, letting the pills roll back and forth across his plate.

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘But I wanted to.’

‘You wanted to!’

‘My proposal was rejected by the funding body.’

‘How do you intend to understand Gramsci when you have never been in Moscow?’

‘But today’s Moscow doesn’t have anything to do with his.’

‘Today’s Moscow may have little to do with Gramsci’s Moscow, but every other city has even less to do with it. We must be content with what we are given. Have you ever been to Sardinia? Have you been through the streets of Sorgono or attended Mass in Ghilarza?’

‘I’ve been to Cagliari. It rained for four days. Then I took the ferry back.’

‘And Sorgono?’

‘I wanted to.’

‘You wanted to!’

‘I waited for two hours in front of the closed bus, but the driver never showed up.’

‘You let yourself be discouraged by a tardy bus driver? If it had been fifty, or a hundred or a general strike of the Sardinian bus service, maybe. But a single driver, Anton! Just one!’

 

The Roman light—glaring, glittering, unbearably clear—was too much for me. I’d gone down into the old city and was wandering through the tiny streets. Everywhere, saints stuck into the facades for centuries looked down on me, the heat was relentless and I felt a dull rage against all the relics that this city kept within itself. One church stood on top of another, when you stepped in to the sacristy you found the remains of another, more distant age, there had never been a clean break anywhere, not in the first or twelfth or even twentieth century. You would never be able to rid yourself of anything because everything was charged with meaning, because this was Rome, the city of all cities, not Bottrop, Brandenburg or Lazio.

At the edge of a piazza, the tables of the tourist traps were protected by parasols and awnings, waiters with open menus were attempting to charm people as they rushed past, laughing off the inflated prices while behind the glass barriers families ate overcooked pasta in loveless cream sauce and a young boy about Lasse’s age was whining about his Cola not being cold enough. His mother rolled her eyes, his father turned away and I wasn’t sure if I felt sorry for them or if, at that moment at least, I was envious.

Without knowing where I wanted to go I turned into another little street. On a corner a misshapen little man was playing violin, in front of a bakery a young couple was arguing. I passed by the old synagogue and stumbled up onto the Lungotevere. In front of me, Tiber Island squatted in the water like a prehistoric amphibian, that island where the contagiously ill had once been locked away along with the mad and the sad so that they wouldn’t infect the whole city.

I followed the river with its glimmering green water, the plane trees along its banks whose trembling shade gnarled the pavement. Two nuns were waiting at a bus stop, a homeless man was asleep on a bench, and I too just wanted to go to sleep, back in my bed in Göttingen with its adjustable frame and new mattress, I wanted to sleep until everything around me was ordered again, had reverted to the predictable uniformity of our first years together back when there was just Hedda and me and the promise of a future professorship, when the irritations—sometimes named Teresa, sometimes Laura, sometimes Verena—did not rip open any gulfs and Hedda still forgave me my mistakes.

I saw Tatiana’s courtyard in my mind again, the face of the old woman at the window and behind her back the deathly pale man with his piled-up hair and round glasses. I shook my head. It must have just been the glasses that reminded me of Gramsci, but it was no wonder I was having such strange ideas in this city. Nothing moved forward because everything was blocked by the ancient shards shooting up from the ground beneath my feet. They’d been trying to build a third underground line for fifty years and every few days construction would stop when, yet again, the digging machines unearthed some remains or other which were supposed to explain something about our past but which really wasn’t our past at all but the past of people who had lived hundreds of years ago. It was simply impossible for the city to join the present. It was impossible to end anything, much less let anything come to an end, and there was nowhere I could escape. I’d have to flee to the far ends of the city, to Ponte Mammolo or Anagnina, just to reach some high-rises from the ’60s, or, if I was lucky, an eyesore from just a few years ago, dusty white bowls which, had the contractors not run out of money, would have been turned into blocks of flats. And that’s what the new seemed like too, made up as it was out of the outlines of rooms that had never seen a roof, everything just an outline, like the ancient excavations at Largo Argentina.

A heavy summer rain broke without warning. People ran down the Lungotevere, from out of nowhere umbrella sellers appeared, tourists waved them off, you just never knew about these street vendors. If Lasse had been with me, he would have put his head under my arm. I began to walk more quickly and sought shelter beneath the monomaniacal columns of a church. Buses snorted past, their windscreen wipers wagging. The vendors yelled after the people streaming past, shouting in to their mobiles, cars honked, and I just wanted to be back in the quiet of a little city in central Germany, among the taciturn and beneath a sun which in August was already pale.