XXXIII. UGO

The first time I travelled to Rome was with Ilsa. It was during the spring holidays in 1978 and she was in an irascible and nervous state. A few days before their official start, she excused me from school and we boarded a train for Munich. Inside, she checked when and where we had to change trains I don’t know how many times (Munich Hauptbahnhof, 22.31) and, once we got there, ordered a local comrade to take me by the hand and wait with us for the night train to Rome in a bar, between clouds of smoke and blurry faces.

We arrived at Stazione Termini the next morning on Track 8. Ilsa, ever the lady, walked across the platform, shoved a pair of sunglasses over her eyes, strolled through the hot, dry air and forgot she had a son with gusto. I trailed behind her, dragging my suitcase. At the taxi stand, she finally remembered my existence and sent the driver to grab me. He came over with dejected steps, took the suitcase out of my hand. I could smell his heavy, tangy aftershave and beamed up at him, feeling that at any moment he would burst into hearty laughter.

We drove down Via Nazionale, past the so-called Typewriter or Wedding Cake which had been erected in honour of Vittorio Emanuele II and which had more nicknames than the seagulls drifting in circles above it. We were staying with friends of Ilsa’s in a dilapidated, two-storey building near Trastevere Station. Out in the hall, an emaciated dog that would have fallen down dead if we looked at it long enough padded up to us. A tube had broken in a wall of the kitchen and caused the wallpaper to have large swathes of dark patches as well as the water bill to go up every year. The whole house seemed to be held up by a single beam which could break at any moment.

The rooms all led into one another and there were countless occupants, serious-looking men all somewhat younger than Ilsa who continuously spoke in soft voices about Toni Negri and Mario Tronti, about Potere Operaio and Lotta Continua and here and there wove in a quote of Gramsci’s. There were two wives and then a third woman who was involved with one of the men or maybe the other, or all of them or, in the end, maybe none of them at all. And there was Ugo.

Elegant from his clothes up to the wrinkles around his mouth, the people in the flat called him the Player, referring to his effortlessly successful way with women as much as the luxurious ease with which he made his way through life. He had an uncle who’d made his way up to being a cardinal and, so they said, resided in a series of impressive marble chambers, which in turn impressed me, and so I tried to find out something about this uncle, but Ugo didn’t talk about it much, maybe because he didn’t like to refer to his proximity to the Vatican, maybe because it was thanks to this uncle that he had everything, Rome and the women and even his melancholic air. ‘Loneliness is a son-of-a-bitch,’ being one of his sayings whenever the people around him got a bit too joyful.

It was the middle of March and Aldo Moro was putting together a government of Christian Democrats and communists, the so-called compromesso storico, the historical compromise. Right in the middle of the Cold War, an unthinkable coalition was being formed: a slap in the face of Western European belief that communism was incapable of governing in a democracy and a monstrosity for the Soviet government which was now being threatened with losing its absolute authority over a smaller party. Could Moro be allowed to have that much power? Wouldn’t the compromise break down internally? And what would be left? An aristocratically smiling Berlinguer who, at most, would reveal himself to simply be a social democrat who’d been labelled incorrectly? Soon the hushed voices grew louder and I was sent to bed.

I’d obtained a room on the second floor from where I could see the river, the green slime passing below me which broke up in little eddies around the height of the Ponte Testaccio. Everything had been dimmed somehow, the light, the volume, the chaotic beauty, as if I’d got stuck somewhere north of the Alps.

The following day, I took my first steps ever in a university, the Sapienza, the campus a fascist-looking little city near the train station. Mixed with the architecture of cheap car parks, it was a bastard that couldn’t have sprung from anything but the head of a mad architect. And you could imagine just about anything at all being taught there, save how to find the right room. Wandering through the corridors of the Department of Law, we saw students hanging around the halls, and, when Ilsa disappeared into an office with a deadly-serious-looking university worker to discuss various conspiratorial affairs for a few minutes, Ugo pointed out the female students to me. We watched them saunter past, young, silky, chatty, with wavy hair or wild curls, with swinging skirts or slim trousers, and I stood there, holding Ugo’s hand, and thought that it would definitely be a good thing to go and study later on.

When Ilsa returned, Ugo smiled at her with his noble charm and ran a hand through her hair. ‘I’m happy we’re saving the Republic, Ilsa, but at the moment I really need an aperitif.’

A little while later we were sitting in a bar on Via Veneto, among teetering shoe tips, skirt hems and bronze-coloured cleavage and I understood that the university had only been a preparatory study. Here the women drank Campari and laughed so effortlessly, it was like life was a silken scarf flapping around their necks as they cruised by in a convertible. And if that shawl happened to get lost, at least it still had style. The world was generous with them. They took whatever they wanted, and never asked who could pay the bill. Ugo always paid a good amount of it. I followed the women with my eyes whenever one of them went to the bathroom, ‘to powder her nose,’ as her companion explained. My whole body was tense; imagining the brush at first timidly then vehemently passing over the bridge of her nose it tingled as if being pumped with a powerful current.

One Thursday—though only spring, the weather was already summer-like—I went with Ilsa and Ugo on a trip outside of the city. We’d set out early in a rush, I hadn’t understood why and neither Ilsa nor Ugo had bothered to explain. They looked half-asleep, and Ilsa poured coffee out of a Thermos into plastic cups. Ugo drove a rickety Fiat which was difficult to reconcile with his usual elegance, but took the curves daringly if rather clumsily when he decided, most of the time too late, to brake. I was happy that I didn’t feel accountable to anyone if I didn’t survive our holidays. Bernd had transferred his salvation to Cuxhaven where I imagined he’d be sitting in a roofed wicker beach chair after work with a female colleague, eating meat patties out of a red-and-white striped cooler. Here, Christian Democratic Prime Minister Moro was leaving his apartment building to drive to Parliament where there was to be a vote of confidence on the fourth Andreotti government to make the historical compromise a reality, and Ugo was slowing down for a three-wheeled Ape with two sheep on its rear bed.

Compromises, I came to understand much later, were half measures. They were made between two or more parties that had imagined something else, something they would prefer to have stayed with. Coming to a compromise was often accompanied by cynical observations, long faces and a lack of sleep. This one here had other dimensions. Moscow was appalled. The largest communist party outside Russia had lost its revolutionary perspective and was threatening to break away from the dictates of the Soviets. Washington was close to having a heart attack: were the door to be opened to the Reds, they’d fall upon the luscious grasslands of the capitalistic world like a herd of rabbits, and, with a great appetite and five-year plans, destroy what had just begun to bloom. The little country of Italy was leading the great powers by the nose, creating a world conflict as if simply arguing about getting the sunniest place on the beach at Ostia. The Iron Curtain was trembling, and, up in the sky where it had been fixed to its heavy eyelets, you could hear a groaning as if at any moment the cumbersome material would come crashing down.

We drove through a heavy cast-iron gate and slowly up a long driveway to a mansion. Balconies stuck out into damp, green palm groves. Lights flickered in the windows, and, on the top floor, a few silhouettes stood out against the coloured glass. Wrapped in white material, a woman stepped out to meet us. Ugo allowed his lips to glide across her cheeks while Ilsa looked angrily on and the woman giggled drily before waving at us to follow her across an endless stretch of grass. The air was heavy. A palm damaged in the last storm creaked above me.

‘Please excuse the mess. I’m just addicted to parties, I’m such a bad girl!’ Her hands fluttered up and down in front of Ugo. In accordance with the times, they were terribly thin, as was the rest of the woman who could have been twenty-five or forty-five, her face had something stony about it and overall she was too haughty to commit to any particular age. With a tired movement, Ugo took hold of her fingers.

‘Don’t worry, Carla, the Pope will forgive you, your father’s deep enough in to the Vatican’s banking affairs.’

‘Well, you know, nothing’s sure any more. Did you know our prime minister was just kidnapped?’ Carla asked. ‘This morning.’

I don’t remember how Ugo responded. I couldn’t say if we’d already learnt of Aldo Moro’s kidnapping in the car or if there was even a radio, and if there was, whether it had been on during the drive or whether it was there in that reality-defying yard that we first learnt that the Republic, the one surrounding us, had tumbled into a further circle of chaos.

A squad of Red Brigades had stopped Moro’s Fiat on Via Fani, Carla said, killed his bodyguards and taken the prime minister captive.

‘Dearest, worrying doesn’t suit you at all,’ Ugo said, running a hand across her forehead.

‘You’re terrible!’ Carla cried and dropped her shoulders. ‘I’m so happy you exist.’ Ilsa stepped on the hem of her white dress and excused herself with a vicious smile not even I would have thought her capable of.

A hundred-year-old or so butler and his young companion opened the doors of the villa and greeted us in a displaced Venetian accent. Through the open entrance we could see into the foyer, a floor in red and white marble where just now a group of elegantly dressed people appeared. Without deigning to turn towards us, three men and a smattering of women walked past. A girl, just one or two years older than I, walked ahead of them with a candelabra.

‘How much I love these days,’ one of the women chirped.

Giggling and with fans aflutter, the group moved on through a massive oak doorway. From the cellar came the sound of pop music. With a great show of emotion, Carla stepped through the door and into a side corridor. The light was dusty, the marble looked like it had been gnawed by insects. From behind a door came the rattle of a washing machine in the spin cycle, from behind another the buzzing of the news. Carla walked on and Ugo followed gravely, Ilsa had too determined a step and I slithered behind them all.

‘Now this country will go under for good,’ Carla said and chuckled hoarsely. ‘But it had to come to this. The agreement was a mistake. Piedmont ate us alive, that’s what happened.’

‘It’s always such a pleasure to hear you talk about things as if you’d been there, Carla,’ Ugo said. In his voice was something that at the time I couldn’t grasp; today I think it betrayed a hesitant, almost aggressive attraction. Ilsa stepped behind them a bit. My being with them was a good thing. Or maybe it wasn’t. In any event, I helped to prevent further invasions of improper terrain and they began to talk about the Red Brigades, the pinched PCI and communism which, in Ugo’s opinion, continued to gallop across Europe like a drunken charger, forgetting the right way over and over again.

Over the following weeks, 6.5 million people would be checked and 38,000 houses would be searched, but not the one at Via Montalcini 8 where former prime minister Aldo Moro was being held in a tiny space behind a bookshelf, writing letters to Giulio Andreotti, to the pope and to his wife, ninety-seven letters in total. In one of the last ones, he wrote: ‘My dearest Noretta, everything is futile if one does not care to open the door. The pope has done little, perhaps he has scruples.’

The room we entered had no end, no beginning either. There was the sound of light jazz and new chairs, people and glasses popped up everywhere we went. Ugo grabbed one, then handed a drink to Carla and another to Ilsa. Carla giggled and disappeared shortly thereafter, like a shadow when the light reaches too much space. Ugo didn’t seem to care and just continued to squint in every direction. Ilsa, however, took a noticeable breath. His fingers nibbled at her bottom, but then a red-haired woman with countless freckles on her shoulders draped herself across his neck. He kissed her forehead but another was already there and he was turning towards a third.

I disappeared into a corner, leant against the oak-wood wall and took sips from a chalice-like glass. Bowls poked out of the wood and with my finger I made the tassels that hung off of them swing back and forth, producing a pleasant feeling of dizziness.

‘You have to know one thing,’ Ugo, all of a sudden standing next to me again, explained as he went into a crouch. This, however, did not affect his noble bearing at all and he peaceably let his glass ring against mine. ‘Communism is standing on the shoulders of midgets.’ He took a sip from his champagne glass and let me try a bit. The sweetness was terribly mixed with the tart, and the little bubbles were too small; in mineral water, at least, they were of a respectable size. ‘Lenin was five-foot-five-inches tall when the Revolution claimed victory in Russia, Stalin fought his way into power at five-foot-six. Gagarin was shot into space in 1961 and was only one fifty-seven, short enough to make him the first man to circle the earth. And when Gramsci died, there was, at best, maybe less than five feet of him.’

The champagne enfolded my mind like a light drug, and Ugo shrank and grew in front of my eyes as if he’d had a bit of Alice’s Wonderland drink.

‘Your mother is an astonishing woman, as you no doubt know. I’ve always felt close to her, but she just does not understand me. Not completely. She understands Italian communism just as little. She saw someone in Berlinguer who wasn’t there. It’s pointless to try any further, I’m sorry. I’m sorry most of all for you.’

I smiled at him even though I did not have the slightest idea what he was talking about. His head wavered before me; fatigue was dragging me to the floor. Shoes scraped across the stone tiles.

Wouldn’t that have been the right moment to free myself from my reluctant growth? To no longer direct all my strength to lazing about in the last row of the classroom or being bothered during break but to getting enough (and more than enough) to eat, to stretching and performing exercises to strengthen my willpower, to escape communism and with it our secretly romanticized bookshelf, the piles of books to the left and right of the Biedermeier sofa, all the earth-twisting kitchen discussions with Gerd, Jürgen and Werdner? Did I really want to march in a row with the likes of those men? Lenin with his cap was never scary to me, it always just seemed to be hiding something (in the end, the fact of his being bald) and I’d liked Stalin for a while because of his massive moustache but was forced to change my mind on the day Gertraud, a motherly friend of Ilsa’s, threw up in the middle of the Persian rug at his sudden appearance on the TV. It must’ve been some anniversary or other, and after calming whispers and Ilsa’s question as to why she’d had to vomit, she answered: ‘Because I believed in him once.’

After that, I never really cared for Stalin too much. And today I know better. I know about the show trials, the purges, the murders without trial, the Gulag, the Terror, the totalitarian depopulation of a country and that Stalin’s rage could have gone on for decades, right up through the domination of the whole world, the definitive removal of all people from the planet.

It must have also had to do with the cosmonaut, the one whose constant smile unnerved but bewitched me, the one who couldn’t do anything but look happy in all the photos, which really made loneliness in orbit nothing and I imagined as making him holy, or maybe it was the feeling that you could be immortal without killing a single human being. Well, whatever the reason, Gagarin was the only one who remained as an explanation.

But I was tired and Aldo Moro had been kidnapped and I didn’t get all the connections that spun and glowed or were simply the pearls of the champagne. I saw the snow-white shimmer around my uncle as he fell victim to yet another woman, and then the young girl who’d been carrying the candelabra walked into the room. She was delicate, but that had more to do with her age than her body type or shape. She could have been thirteen or fourteen, right in the middle of the greatest hormonal metamorphosis which to me was just a remote mystery. She seemed lost, but blissfully suspended somehow. She tiptoed up to this man, then that one, let them pat her hair, cheeks and even her waist and giggled just like Gina Nazionale. I don’t know how long I had been staring at her by the time she noticed me. It must have been an eternity, one of those eternities you preserve and keep in-between heavy books like flowers. She hesitantly turned on her socks, then cast a second glance in my direction, let a man brush the hair out of her face and then suddenly and almost defiantly stalked over to me.

Her legs were covered in mosquito bites and the lazy scabs of childhood, but they had grown too long to completely hide anything. Her face was already busy practicing expressions whose meaning she did not yet understand, and her breasts were growing frighteningly, touchingly and unmistakably beneath her blouse. She crouched next to me and in place of a greeting blew in my face. Then she said something in Italian, and when she noticed that I did not understand, rolled her eyes, showing me in no uncertain terms that she thought I was pretty dumb. Nevertheless, she continued to sit next to me and here and there cast a provocative glance at one of the men dancing past.

As if she had forgotten her previously unsuccessful attempt, she spoke to me again. I listened to her for a while, her lips opened and closed and at one point I was convinced she was asking me how old I was, presumably because I felt exhausted and believed she too would have to be reasonable and recognize the all-too-large difference between us. With my fingers I showed her the number eleven, but she just leant forward, bent over my index finger as it lingered over the two blank palms, grabbed it with her hand, sank her head and enveloped it with her lips. I was so surprised that for a moment I bounced onto my behind, then just remained sitting. She pressed my shoulders to the floor, held my hand in hers, my finger caught between her lips, I felt her teeth graze over the wrinkles of skin on the joint, then the milky tip of her tongue. Shoes scraped across the stone tiles. I briefly opened my eyes and saw the shadowy form of dangling key tassels above me.