XXXVII. CYPRESSES

‘I really am sorry about our project,’ I said again to Brevi as I was getting ready to leave.

‘Well, that’s the way it is,’ he answered. We were out in front of the building, and he was leant up against the garden gate, his shoulders slumped. When I moved to give him my hand, he pulled me in and embraced me for a long time.

‘All the best, Anton. Look after your son.’

I climbed into the taxi and looked back at Brevi. He limply raised his hand, waved, and for the first time looked like an old man. The driver turned the engine.

At Porta Pia, we dove into the underpass. I stared at the orange lights beyond the windscreen, a motorcycle overtook us, a bus turned its headlights on and off. The taxi sped up and we came back out into the daylight. The buildings blew past, dirty windowsills, cables, tubes. To my right, plane trees lining the pavement. Behind them the Tiber.

‘This is where Matteotti was kidnapped,’ I said.

‘Who?’

‘A socialist.’

‘Was that in the paper today?’

‘No, that was ninety years ago.’

‘Well, there you go.’ The driver flicked the rosary hanging off the rear-view mirror and turned up the radio. To my left, the narrow side-streets. A rusty sign with a red carnation. I leant forward and tapped the driver on the shoulder.

‘Excuse me, are you sure this is the right way?’

‘You want to go to Fiumicino, right?’

‘No, I think . . . ’

‘Do you have to go to Ciampino?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Ciampino’s got the cheap flights and the pope. All the others are at Fiumicino.’ The driver cast me a quick glance over his shoulder. ‘And you’re definitely not the pope.’

‘Sorry. I mixed up the days.’

‘Why don’t you have a look at your ticket?’

‘My flight’s tomorrow,’ I said testily.

‘Should I drive you back?’

‘No, no. Here’s fine,’ I replied. ‘Here’s fine.’

‘Whatever.’

He stopped in the car lot in front of the old slaughterhouse, heaved my luggage out of the boot and smiled at me quizzically.

A group of tourists was standing in front of the entrance to what had, in the meantime, become a museum for modern art. Red faces, shirts soaked with sweat, guidebooks at their chests. A small girl pulled at her mother’s hand, her cheeks were so red she looked like she was feverish and I asked myself if Lasse was really as sick as Hedda claimed or whether it was just another one of her exaggerations. Behind the gate, a bamboo sculpture like a wooden flame towered 10 metres up into the air. A massively delicate cone leaning to the left, as if bent by the wind.

‘And you would be happy to know that the new slaughterhouse was opened on Via Togliatti in 1975,’ a tour guide said, with her yellow umbrella she looked like a giant pole. A man with a camera strapped to his neck raised his arm and, without anyone having called on him, began to share his painstakingly superficial knowledge: he’d read that, in the past, the nobility’s horse troughs had been filled with clean water while the horses of the middle class had no choice but to drink the dishwater from the kitchen. What did she have to say about that?

‘Well, first of all, the animals were not brought here to drink,’ Miss Pole said in her defence. The next gust of wind would blow her away together with her umbrella, the goddamn know-it-all. That’s when I saw Tatiana in front of the wall to Monte Testaccio. She was just turning into the road that lead to the cimitero acattolico, to the Protestant Cemetery, as it had often and erroneously been called. I turned away from Miss Pole and hurried after Tatiana.

‘Please donate three euros, we need it urgently,’ I read on a sign next to a Perspex box with a few coins and some bills from who-knows-where. Leaving the pyramid of Cestius off to my left, I passed Lenore Kipp-Cotten who’d been immortalized with an oblong memorial stone from her husband and, like every time I came here, tried to find the right way. An Englishman in colonial garb was hanging around Keats. A woman was watering a grave. No one was looking at the architect Muller or the memorial to Lenore Kipp-Cotten.

I looked around for Tatiana, but didn’t see her anywhere. Two thin women dressed in black were standing in front of a bush like widowed guardians and didn’t even look up when I walked past. In one of the rows, a few columns had fallen over each other; in another, a mourner was missing their stone head. Between Hermann Immer, who’d disappeared from Bern one hundred and fifty years ago, and a certain Herr Wendriner whose grave was in the process of being exhumed, there were recent birth and death dates which made me feel caught somehow, as if I’d overlooked my own demise out of simple carelessness.

I followed a bald German man with his wife. Distraught by the Roman summer, the couple made their way through the rows of graves without looking up at the cypresses towering into the sky at all, which, in my opinion, were well worth seeing. A little later a stocky, dark-haired man ended up behind us. He had rolled up the arms of his shirt and had a red guidebook, the Giro d’Italia, a book which had not been in print since the ’60s.

The atmosphere was oppressive. The traffic which had stupefied me on those few steps to the cemetery entrance, the streets tangling into one another with all their pedestrians— HolyMaryMotherofGod, let me cross over to the other side in health—fell away like a feverish dream. Just one more step and then everything went silent, as if I were stepping out onto the open, wind-still sea. One of Gramsci’s stories came to mind, the one about the shipwreck survivors in their lifeboat who turned into cannibals.

I shook myself. What an awful idea. I looked for Tatiana among the rows again. I knew that she had to be close by, that she would soon show up, nothing else was possible. But my eyes weren’t made for this kind of sun, they were too lazy and my body too porous. Your pupils had to be elastic, like a cat’s, or covered by a particularly thick cornea. The heat spilt through my mind and I thought I was beginning to hallucinate. I saw an old, tall man strolling through the lanes. In and of itself that was nothing. But the fact that he looked like Piero Sraffa unnerved me. He came closer, stood in front of the headless statue and looked at the grave. Then he looked up and we found ourselves staring at each other. His eyebrows were like swings. His ears and nose were so large it was as if they had grown together with his intellect. His few remaining white hairs billowed about his head. In short, there was no doubt that this man was the ancient Italian economist and partner of Gramsci’s, Piero Sraffa. He turned away and looked into the distance, as if waiting for someone.

From the upper rows where Shelley and Goethe’s son were buried, a woman rushed past. She must have still been young, or moved that way at least, despite wearing an old-fashioned skirt of bright fabric that rocked stiffly about her ankles. Her face was transparent. Her shoulder-length hair was dark blonde. I knew that I knew her, but could not remember from where.

The branches crackled, a hissing arose at every step. The noises sounded as if they were coming from an old radio. Sraffa went to meet the woman. She held a hand to her chest as if she’d been running and now had to catch her breath. They spoke to so softly I could barely make out syllables. I thought I heard the word ‘cannibals’. And again: ‘cannibals’. That was the only word that made its way over to me.

And then I knew who the woman was. All at once, the correlations seemed to grow clear; that, or the ambiguity lost its strength. If the man before her was Sraffa, then she was no other than Gramsci’s sister-in-law. Tania Schucht. She held Sraffa by the arm of his shirt, he bent to her, her lips close to his ear, she spoke quickly, he nodded, his expression composed but with an almost unbearable melancholy. A melancholy I knew only from Brevi.

And then everything went black. Switched off. I felt a shock. That was it. Maybe I fell over. Maybe I was lying down. Maybe I was still sitting in a taxi on my way to the airport.

‘You said something,’ someone said.

I shook my head without knowing if it was me they meant. There was my fatigue, the heat, not to mention all the coffee I’d had since waking up, without once having a glass of water. A red dot floated before my eyes.

‘You called out to someone.’

The red dot began to take shape. I could read the gold lettering: Giro d’Italia. Under my back, I could feel the scratch of stones; I’d fallen down right onto the middle of the path. Someone helped me up—the bald man, his wife, the man with the book—and before me I saw a withered carnation the wind had blown off a grave.

‘If you’ll allow me,’ the man with the guidebook said shyly. Standing there in a daze, he took hold of my arm. The couple nodded to us encouragingly, and we took off along the path like two old lovers—past the Orthodox crosses, past Muller and Kipp-Cotten—for the exit. Quickly looking back to the headless mourner I saw Brevi and Tatiana, my Tatiana, abruptly split apart.