When I arrived in Rome, I went to live in the Pensione Fiorentina, on the recommendation of my friend Spadafora the journalist. The pensione was on the Via del Tritone and had an international clientele.
In any other major European city the place would have been a dreadful mistake from the point of view of comfort. It was located in one of the noisiest and most central areas in Rome. You couldn’t possibly imagine enjoying the slightest rest or tranquility there. However, appearances can be deceptive, even in Rome. The boarding house occupied part of the structure of an old palace with enormous rooms and the thickest of walls. The outer forms of that old bulwark had been removed when it was converted into a modern house, but the old walls survived and isolated the house from the urban hue and cry. It wasn’t the peace you find in provincial cities. A vague and distant singsong hum drifted through the house from nine A.M. to eleven P.M. But it wasn’t a strident, insoluble noise that attacked the nervous system. The bother was minimal.
A restaurant was on the ground floor and the boarding house occupied the first and fourth floors. A small, narrow cul-de-sac separated it from the house next door. When I arrived, I was allotted bedroom twelve on the first floor. It didn’t look over the street, but over the end of a passageway that led to the back of the building. Full of cheap furniture from the days of Cavour worn threadbare by constant use, it was a dark, gloomy spot. A disjointed gallery – the old palace loggia – meant the bedroom window had no access to the open space at the rear; if a sunbeam ever shone in, it looked like a stray sunbeam that had come from nowhere, of its own volition. The window’s location blocked my view of the bottom of the open area, though I could see the picturesque, very Italian upper reaches. I could see clotheslines strung from one balcony to the next, various chicken coops, huge amounts of old junk, and the branches of a vine the roots of which I never did track down. Decrepit and precariously balanced, everything seemed to hang by a thread, but kept up perfectly. In addition, there was a constant din that sometimes turned into a fierce war of words. An unhappy couple lived in the area – always open to the world – opposite my bedroom window and they engaged in shouting matches that followed on in quick succession. When they started shrieking, other neighbors leaned out of their windows to try to shut them up by bawling wildly. Once the contest had begun, all the children in the vicinity began to cry their hearts out, as if on cue; the dishwashers in the ground-floor restaurant, encouraged by the verbal jousting, clattered their buckets of dirty crockery, and a Latin teacher, a man with a long beard, wound up by the relentless screaming, and unable to work on his papers, leaned out of his window with a clarinet to his lips and blew at full blast for as long as was necessary. His method usually worked: when that crazy din peaked, the general din began to fade. It was the application of the similia similibus curantur of quack medicine to rowdy conjugal tiffs. When the teacher had achieved his aim, he smiled smugly and withdrew, placing his clarinet vertically on the most visible part of his window ledge, both to prompt a general sense of shame and indicate he was ready to repeat the method the moment the row recommenced.
Though these inner exchanges at the Pensione Fiorentina were perhaps not the politest, I found them very helpful in accustoming my ear to the various dialects of the peninsula.
Spadafora’s recommendation turned out to be highly beneficial. The management treated me very kindly and the manager sometimes came into my bedroom to pass the time of day. This gentleman – a German from the south – was in his forties, on the thin side, fair, blue-eyed and sallow-skinned with big, transparent ears that stuck out; his head had been shaved all over, except for over his forehead which was furnished with rather a rakish commercial toupé. He wore the black morning coat and striped trousers managers of such places tend to wear. He spoke very precisely, in a staccato syncopated style to avoid confusion and define the limits of the stream of topics rehearsed. His favorite gesture was to enumerate his statements and arguments by counting them on his fingers and then conclude a subject by moving his hands as if an invisible plumb-line was dangling in front of him. He always held his thumb next to his little finger ready to count and sometimes described a circle in the air, dividing it into angles and sections as if he was slicing a watermelon. Each slice was a topic … His passion for precision succeeded in giving his trivial conversation a grandiose ring, and among his acquaintances – not to mention his clientele – he was thought to be a man of the golden mean with original opinions. One couldn’t deny that he was strong on method.
As I said, the boarding house was international, though the clientele was essentially German. In my time, however, there were lots of Russian émigrés and the language they spoke – as wistful and sugary as jam – was often to be heard in the small sitting room and dismally dark passageways.
Mommsen the historian figured as the most distinguished occasional lodger in the annals of that boarding house. This fact was the Pensione Fiorentina’s crowning glory. The manager boasted how he tied the great man’s shoelaces one day when the sirocco had brought on an attack of rheumatism. After he’d said that, I took the opportunity to put a question to him.
“If you tied his shoelaces,” I said, “you probably noticed his feet. I’ve heard that Mommsen’s feet were huge, very fat and quite extraordinary, the most impressive feet a historian may ever have had. Could you confirm this was in fact true?”
The manager looked at me sternly and refused to answer. I realized that Mommsen was untouchable in that household, that he was a holy of holies, and memories of him were idealized and embellished and simply floated on air.
One day the manager told me an anecdote that highlighted the historian’s character.
When Mommsen was in Rome, he worked in the Vatican Library. One afternoon he was in his usual place in the library when the Pope walked in on the spur of the moment, with none of the rituals of protocol. When his presence was noted, everyone stood up. Only Mommsen remained seated at his table as if nothing had changed. The Pope crossed the vast reading room and entered the Prefect’s office, keen above all to pass unperceived. Within two hours the whole of Rome was talking about what had happened. The manager’s features glowed with the most ardent admiration, as he asked me: “What do you think? Could one have shown finer mettle, been firmer and more single-minded? Oh, what a man that Mommsen was! A proper German of the old school! Don’t you agree?”
“No, I don’t. I think what he did was quite deplorable, an act of complete discourtesy. One can be as anti-Papist as you like but Mommsen, in the Vatican Library, wasn’t in his own home, and when you are in someone else’s and the master enters, good manners require that you stand up …”
The manager stiffened, glared at me, muttered a few unintelligible words and changed the subject.
A few days later, it became evident that the manager championed imperialist ideas, he spoke admiringly to me about the war.
“I never studied military matters,” he said, “and I really regret that, believe me. There’s nothing like war, it is life at its fullest, most instinctive and cheerful. One lives by the day and past and future don’t exist. Now that those effeminate hairdressers in Paris are in charge, how can one expect the world to be right? You know: one … two … three … etc.”
Initially, I found the manager amusing; when he became bellicose, he was a pain. His precise, numbered conversation, his gestures, plumb-lines and rules began to pall. I tried to contradict him – relatively persistently – and not just let him spout on. It was like lighting tinder. He became furious when I raised my first objections and then wilted completely. His method quivered on his lips. Finally he gave me a fierce, pitying look and left my bedroom, slamming the door behind him. From then on I only saw him behind his desk, when I went in or out of the front door. We nodded blankly at each other by way of a greeting.
The boarding house had two very pleasant chambermaids: Ida and Rosetta. Ida was tall and thin and from the Piedmont; she was rather undernourished, with long, slender legs, luscious brown tresses, dry lips and the most beautiful dark, impish eyes that brimmed with life. She lived in a constant state of nervous tension, was astonishingly lithe, and desperate to smoke Macedonia cigarettes.
“A cigarette, a cigarette … Ida would say every two or three minutes peering round my door, a pitiful expression in her bright, mischievous eyes.
I gave her one and she lit up. She smoked like a child, staring hard at the flame. Two dimples came to her cheeks. Then, surprising herself, she exhaled the smoke through her nose, with an expression of ineffable delight, gripping the cigarette in one hand and supporting the back of her neck with the other, elbow in air, like a picture postcard odalisque. Ida felt passionate about her smokes and liked to live inside a fleeting pinky blue cloud.
“Well then, Ida,” I’d ask, “are you deeply in love?”
“Oh, l’amore!” she’d go, grinning suddenly, her arms aloft, turning round, swinging her head back, her hair in a tangle, showing off her white, warm bosom. Then she’d come over and whisper softly: “What do you think? I think love is irresistible …”
“The wife of a friend of mine is of a similar mind …”
I said that frivolously in keeping with the situation, but she seemed to think I was being spiteful.
Ida and Rosetta weren’t what you could call friends. Perhaps at root they couldn’t see eye to eye. They spied on each other and the manager had achieved a fine equilibrium in the service on the first floor via their bickering.
Rosetta came from Venice. She was thirty-five, tall, well-built, wore dark clothes and had gray eyes, a small nose, and red hair. Ida was like quicksilver. Rosetta was the quiet, placid sort. Ida was noisy and nervy. Rosetta walked down the passageways without making a sound.
“Just imagine!” said Ida talking about her. “She’s separated from her husband …”
“Can’t you understand that?”
“I can understand everything except a woman who leaves her husband. What does Rosetta have that other women don’t?”
“I know, I know … but life holds so many mysteries …”
“I think she’s an evil woman and that her husband is right. She is hypocritical and selfish, cattiva.”
“How can you possibly know? Has she ever hurt you?”
“No, but that red hair of hers can only mean trouble. Besides, she’s tedesca …”
Rosetta said her companion was apensierata and perfidious, though she said that so calmly, so imperturbably she might have been talking about the weather.
Ida tried to treat me with a degree of complicity. She’d come into my bedroom, ask for a cigarette, light it and sit on a chair. If I didn’t feel like talking or was working, she smoked in silence and gave me the occasional quizzical look, as if she was in the presence of a rare, harmless but sizable animal. The sight of my table strewn with books and papers was probably what most inspired respect in her.
When people in Italy see a gentleman behind a table full of books and papers, they exclaim gravely and pityingly, “È un signore che lavora col cervello!”
“You’re always reading …” Ida said one late afternoon. “Do you like reading so much?”
“Less by the day. What about you?”
“I’ve never liked reading. I don’t have the patience, reading bores me. Books all say the same things …”
“Do you like Rome, Ida?”
“No, Rome is all churches. There are one or two in my town, Asti, naturally, but there they organize first-rate afternoon dances and the wine is frizzante and really good …”
Ida was aware of everything that happened in the boarding house, of when people came and went: she was an alert nosy parker and could keep you up-to-date on all fronts.
“Today,” she said one afternoon, “the Viennese lady received a wonderful bouquet of flowers!
“Which Viennese lady?”
“The one living opposite your room in number eleven. She’s young and beautiful, but very delicate …”
“Is she ill?”
“She’s not left her room for a month. She has a nurse. She spends her days reading on the sofa.”
“So who is this lady? Is she married? Is she single?”
Ida shrugged her shoulders and then replied: “She comes from Vienna. She receives a large bouquet of flowers every day and lots of presents. Yesterday she was brought a wonderful gold ring.”
“Doesn’t she have visitors?”
“Not one. Her nurse never leaves her. She sees the doctor. Sometimes the Monsignore who lives on the fourth floor pays her a visit … perhaps he’s her confessor.”
“So why does she live here? She could probably afford to live in a grand hotel.”
Ida didn’t reply.
After that conversation I began to feel vaguely curious about the lady who lived in number eleven. When I walked down the passage, I’d glance at her door. It was almost always shut and I never heard a noise inside. Once it happened to be open and I took a brief look. A few days later, at dusk, the door was open wider still and I saw the lady in question.
At the back I saw a large window that let in the dull light from the cul-de-sac overlooked by that part of the building. The lady was lying down, as if in a fainting fit – her forehead lolling backwards on an ottoman, surrounded by cushions, eyes shut and arms dangling down, as if they were tired. Diluted by the gray glow from outside, the blue electric light fell on her face, blurring her features. I thought she looked like a woman in her thirties, tall, svelte, and in her prime. Her ethereal, transparent gold hair seemed particularly magnificent.
My café in Rome has always been the Caffé Greco, Via Condotti. It is a quiet, peaceful café, with customers – especially at certain times of day – accustomed to making the least noise possible. In that sense it seems more like a northern European café, and if rain streamed down the windows more often, the illusion would be perfect. But Rome in fresh watercolors isn’t the norm. Piranesi is more in abundance.
I sat at the back of the café, in the rectangular room under the skylight. In the early afternoon a ghostly, rather tense, sour light penetrated the thick glass panes in the ceiling: the dawn light of late-risers, a rather sad, empty dawn, without a hint of pink. The scant customers using the café at that time tended to be foreign clerics. Once they’d sat down on a red velvet bench, they’d light up a heavy clerical pipe or cigar in a holder opposite an espresso and glass of cold water.
My companion in that café was usually the Count de Logotete. Don Antoni Logotete – for that’s what he called himself – was a slightly built old man, who was beginning to wrinkle, with an almost imperceptible hint of a hunchback. He dressed superbly and always looked fresh out of the box. He had a few wisps of white hair, blue eyes, thin lips and nose, an insect’s hands, large transparent ears, and a nasal voice that quivered like a kid-goat’s.
He had lived in Madrid for many years and was married to a distinguished Madrid lady, a very silent person who seemed to prefer a life of solitude and memories to mingling with the madding crowd. The lady’s temperament was much appreciated by her husband who repaid her silence and the freedom she gave him with trite, tender clichés.
Logotete spoke Spanish with an elegant, ceremonial diction and the grammatical perfection of a paper-bound academic. His phrasing was sometimes so perfect there was no way one could understand him. It was a language devoid of character or the charm of exceptions and irregularity; it was enameled and embalmed. At any rate he seemed to cherish good memories of our country and, as he said, his final expectation in life was to die in the country house his wife owned among the pine groves in the province of Cuenca. Though gossip had it that the house and its pine groves were a pure fantasy of his own making, since the countess, in terms of property, had barely ever had anything grander than a Madrid boarding house to her name.
He was a genuine Palaiologos, a pure Greek from Byzantium, related to Maurice Paléologue, the famous French ambassador, who held that position in Saint Petersburg at the tragic time when war declared in 1914. His father had been the Greek minister in Paris and knew Lord Byron and Capodistria. He had received an outstanding education in France and Germany and was a man who belonged to an extinct species: a one hundred percent European. He possessed the most intricately elegant Latin that has ever been constructed in this ignorant era, a Latin the Monsignori in Rome found too perfect in a layman and thus suspected him of being a follower of Voltaire. His polyglot knowledge of living languages was almost criminal, and, apart from European languages, his family languages were Turk and Modern Greek – though he could never speak them to his wife. He had received a legal training, and his French and German universities had accepted his famous theses on the Pandects when he was a student. He belonged to the historical school and venerated Savigny and Fustel de Coulanges as his masters. Though an adept of a particular school, however, the count never tried to resolve his problems by following the principles he theoretically considered to be definitive and set in marble. He was an empiricist in practice and was fond of saying that principles are only of use when one is ill or has lots of money.
When he came into his substantial inheritance, he purchased a stable of racehorses he took to Ostend. That led him to enjoy a markedly mundane life of leisure that was notoriously at odds with the traditionally conservative principles he advocated as an academic. The truth is his mind swung between contradictions that he found impossible to resolve for many years until the German invasion in 1914 swept away like a deluge racetracks, stables, horses, bookmakers, and top hats. He then began a vagabond life trying out fresh options. In Spain he met the person who became his countess. In Argentina he devoted himself to cattle-breeding. He was Greece’s commercial attaché – with little in the way of commerce – in Portugal, until he fetched up in Rome as an old man with little in the way of cash, which is where I made his acquaintance.
From the very first I was under the impression that Logotete’s material problems in the Eternal City had been stressful and various. Nothing is grimmer in this kind of city than pressing problems of that nature. He lived in a room – with the right to a kitchen – in a dingy, down-at-heel palace on Via Borgogna, a labyrinth of a place owned by Prince Colonna. He lived by giving private lessons. One day advertisements appeared in shop windows on Corso in which the count offered the citizens of Rome and foreign communities lessons in Sanskrit, Turkish, Greek, and Latin. It was depressing to see a man who had professed such affection for purebred horses and beautiful women transmuted into a teacher of dead languages. The roast-chicken hue of the venerable stone of ancient Rome made the spectacle even more woeful, because ancient stones provide an incentive to get on with life. Be that as it may, his teaching, though not a failure, didn’t allow him very much leeway. Enough to visit twice a day one or other of those Italian bars that are so metallic and shiny, with shelves full of green, yellow, pink, or orangey aperitifs, eat two chicken croquettes, and drink a small glass of cherry-colored wine. These croquettes were always the target of fierce criticism in Italy, their chicken content being held to be dubious, and, in any case, most deficient.
In his Caffé Greco era, however, Logotete entered an eventful period of growth. Things had eased for him most unexpectedly.
One night, when the count and countess were peacefully asleep in their spacious bedroom, large slabs of plaster attached to the ceiling rafters came away. The noise was awful and was heard by panic-stricken citizens in the neighborhood who summoned the firemen. The falling plaster was accompanied by dense white clouds of dust that the plaster spread all over the bedroom. The illustrious couple could easily have been if not buried under the material, at least quite bruised, that is, if the material that came away had coincided with the area occupied by their bed. Fortunately, that part of the ceiling held up well.
Predictably, the catastrophic damage made the count panicky, a panic the arrival of firemen only increased. However, when he realized he’d not been injured he took refuge in philosophy and attributed the disaster to the generally adverse forces of nature. Less steeped in metaphysics, the countess had experienced such a shock they had to call a doctor. Moreover, it soon transpired that pieces of plaster had fallen on her legs. This put her in a lot of pain and she was driven to hospital in an ambulance they urgently summoned.
In those very same ominous early hours, while the firemen were clearing debris out of the bedroom, the count meditated at length on the misfortune he’d just suffered. He made his own analysis and considered the situation from all angles. When the first light of dawn glimmered, he looked elated and his blue eyes sparkled mischievously. They weren’t the eyes of a man who’d been stunned by the sight of seven hundred and fifty kilos of plaster ceiling falling next to his body.
He rang an architect’s office at nine and had a document drawn up to the effect that the house he inhabited had been threatening to collapse. An hour later, at ten, he walked into Prince Colonna’s administrative offices and half an hour later came out beaming. The count had just earned three thousand lire, the first tangible fruit of the catastrophe to which he almost fell victim. With that first tranche he began to feel free of immediate stress, and devoted most of his time to public libraries researching the jurisprudence related to his case from the Twelve Tables onwards. His wife had the good sense to understand her husband’s thinking and didn’t rush to leave hospital. There’s nothing like good character and pleasant manners to help prolong one’s stay in a charitable institution. The countess was endowed with these virtues and her totally imaginary ills were respected most benignly. Colonna’s administrator, terrified by the possibility of litigation, paid out a decent amount of lire every month. Don Antoni increased his intake of croquettes and small glasses of wine. He added in slices of pink mortadella, small plates of fresh cucumber and Russian salad, palpable throwbacks to his old life in Ostend. The catastrophe did him proud: he recovered; his ears lost their transparency. In the meantime, plaster from jurisprudence increased daily. But as that pile expanded, the jurisprudence thinned out and began to roam off beam. But that didn’t matter. Good will has always counted more when applying jurisprudence than strict analogies. Most sensibly Count Logotete foresaw that Prince Colonna’s administrator would wake up in a bad temper one day and decide he’d exhausted his humanitarian sentiments. In effect, that was what happened: the administrator called it a day at thirty thousand lire, saying the disaster had been paid for, was over. However, by then Don Antoni had amassed an impressive stack of material. These papers were given over to a lawyer, an enemy of the Colonna household, who possessed dazzling verbal skills. The case began on an impressively combative note.
“Onto the Supreme Court!” bleated Don Antoni.
“Yes! Onto the Supreme Court!” repeated his lawyer in that baritone bass he made his very own.
They embraced tenderly and embarked on their journey to the highest realms of justice.
Thus began a phase of relative prosperity in the life of Don Antoni Logotete – I don’t think I need underline how relative it was – a phase that was very helpful for my own cultural enrichment. If the catastrophe of the plaster slabs and the surprising aftermath hadn’t happened, Don Antoni would never have decided to visit the antiquities of Rome and I would never have had the opportunity to benefit from them. Happenstance rules even our moments of leisure and relaxation.
The past of cities like Rome that have a great future before them doesn’t usually interest the people who are rooted there. Beauty and history, museums and archaeology represent an element of routine in the life of these individuals, a subject that holds no surprises or interest, mere local news that boosts the self-esteem of the citizenry, but that newspapers only air when there is nothing more lucrative to vent. They are things they leave to foreigners, occasional visitors, and tourists. So many, many people live round the corner from dazzling collections of art, great museums, and have never thought of paying them a visit! The inhabitants of Rome react like that on the grand scale, probably because of the remarkable wealth of the city’s possessions. Notoriously, they have other business on their minds. Foreigners experience something similar: they are extremely curious on the first few days and want to see the lot, then a similar indifference sets in. Nevertheless, blissful are those in Rome or Italy who manage to keep their minds open, their curiosity alert, and their spirits as buoyant as a tourist’s!
Once the court case was begun and begun in a powerful fighting spirit, Don Antoni was swept along by a wave of tourist fancies. After so many months of inner drought, of disasters and calamities when curiosity had to focus on the demands of daily life, this new period opened with great élan and expectations. I don’t know if this was driven by spiritual impulses or the absolutely visible increase in his food supply. It hardly matters. The truth is Don Antoni was in a bountiful mood and suggested we should devote our spare time to a spot of relaxing archaeology. He knew Rome very well, and the archaeological part he preferred was in the center, and that was exactly what I preferred. The Eternal City’s past is so vast and complex that, if you don’t want to lose your way, you must of necessity curb your curiosity. Even so, the possibilities are enormous.
I liked all that part of the city located on the left of the Piazza Venezia when one is looking directly at the monument to Vittorio Emmanuele; from the Piazza to the Coliseum and the entire area dominated by that imposing mass. At the time the area I’m referring to was one immense pile of ruins where arches in a good state of conservation, like Titus’s, for example, stood out as if it was a real effort. The entire zone was exactly as it was in Goethe’s times, perhaps even in a worse state, because the best preserved monuments had been fenced off with diverse shapes and sizes of wrought iron. Nobody ever painted these fences, the iron had rusted giving the ruins they were protecting a gloomy air – like funereal pantheons bourgeois taste has erected in cemeteries. Natural deterioration and crumbling stone contrasted with the tedious, mass-produced railings. However, that was the only way they had found to ensure the stones were left in peace.
In winter Rome is a colorful city of delicate shades and aromas but in summer, during the day, there is an explosion of grayish white light that is an implacable, monotonous glare. The light seems to suck the color from the venerable stones that are covered with a luminous crust that has the texture of fine sand. It is a sad, dazzling, and explosive light the very whiteness of which induces melancholy. Even on days when a southerly wind blows, the sky is a wan blue diluting into incandescent white. The solitude, the emptiness of the sky, is a constant: any attempt at cloud is reabsorbed in the vast white vault that, dotted with metallic pinpoints of light, shimmers like glistening mica.
That summer, Don Antoni and I strolled through that shapeless agglomeration that would later be crossed by the Passegiata Archeologica: one of the most striking streets in Europe, that most vibrates with intimations of the eternal. We strolled there in the blistering sun and in white, muted moonlight. If it was interesting by day, it was even more so by night. Even a naturalist would have found it interesting.
I don’t remember ever seeing such a concentration of salamanders and lizards like the one populating those venerable walls, arches, and the inscriptions that Logotete read to me. Those animals lived a wonderful life on the hot stones, among the dry dusty weeds growing in the cracks. There was also the occasional scorpion. Lizards poked their flattened, triangular heads out of holes in the stone. Salamanders ran up and down the columns, played in the corners of pedestals, slept on ashlars that retained the pomp of earlier days …
Now nearly everyone can visit these sites without leaving their means of transport. There are roads to the ruins. Earlier tourists were more longsuffering and generally visited the archaeological areas on foot and equipped with an umbrella. Those pink, orange, or mauve lady’s umbrellas were pretty in the suffocating light of Rome. The gentlemen wore panama hats – that eventually turned brown – and severe light-gray alpaca jackets.
On our strolls we would meet a lot of tourist groups, generally of the Nordic variety, and I say Nordic because with their fair hair and fresh red cheeks they had a family air about them. The ladies inevitably resembled the photograph in the medallions the men wore on their watch chains. Hanging from a waistcoat button, the chain fell in two pompous loops suspended from symmetrical pockets. The watch was on the left and the purse on the right. Not long ago I saw one of these purses made from silver chainmail that looked as if it would last for ever. It made the strangest impact: it looked like an antique object – more prehistoric than a Paleolithic axhead.
They didn’t react immediately, because they came very culturally informed and obsessed by ancient Rome. However, a lady would suddenly blanch, her umbrella would shake between her fingers, and she would shriek instinctively, spontaneously, slightly raising her skirts (they wore bootees in those days), panic spreading all over her face. The lizards and salamanders had been sighted. “Over there, over there!” shouted the frightened lady in Norwegian or Finnish, pointing her finger at the large dark green head of a huge lizard asleep, half in the sun, half in the shade of rocks. Then they got goose bumps and were astonished because they’d not expected anything of the sort. The Baedecker was a perfect book; the last edition of that famous guide described the state of the cobbles, the more or less dense dust on an avenue, and whether soup in a particular hotel was excellent, good, average, or merely drinkable. What the Baedecker didn’t mention was the presence of so many beasties among the illustrious ruins. If the group included very impressionable ladies, the presence of our slithering friends produced a real outbreak of screaming. The salamanders ran and hid, rustling over dry grass. The lizards opened an eye, retreated slightly, and then shut it again as if dying of bliss. The guides felt duty-bound to provide explanations that were rather pedestrian. “This demonstrates, ladies and gentlemen,” they’d say in rudimentary English, “how inscrutably ancient these ruins are …” Their husbands had to promise they would write to Herr Baedecker, in Leipzig, the moment they were back in the hotel. The fact was that the shock had been too great for them to continue the visit with any profit. “We’ll come back another day,” they said, much to the chagrin of their guides who obviously didn’t care a fig about those little critters. And, eventually, they did return, now better equipped to deal with the archaeological fauna.
Don Antoni, who was a skeptic, was more amused watching such scenes than deciphering mutilated inscriptions or formulating conjectures about quarried stone or heaps of cadaverous rubble.
On summer evenings we used to go to the Greco for coffee, and then we’d head to the ruins via Corso and the Piazza Venezia. It was hot. People were eating ice cream on the terraces in the gallery. Ladies wore light clothes. We sometimes passed a horse-drawn carriage with folk in open shirts, sleeves rolled up, singing songs and playing the mandolin. The glow from the streetlights lit up the golden, roast-chicken color of the stone of the old palaces on Corso. Everyone was sweating slightly and gesticulating languidly. Everyone, if they’d dared, would like to have launched into passionate song. Everyone was humming some vague tune. Logotete strode on, oblivious to the oppressive Roman night; short and rigid, he wore a stiff, well-ironed collar, a buttoned-up jacket, a bowler hat, and flourished a gleaming walking stick.
At that time of night, we didn’t roam too far into that convulsed scenario of ruins. If it was moonlit, we went over to the monuments surrounded by iron fencing and looked at them as one might observe a caged animal. As their pedestal was lower than the level of the surrounding earth, they were always surrounded by a broad pit. A large number of rats lived – generally safely – in these depressions. The Rome Town Hall maintained a legion of cats on the terrain to exterminate them, or at least to keep them under control. However, the archaeological department cats were extremely moody, and though the rats were often visible and climbed up to touch the fences, they refused to carry out the mission with which they had been charged. “They’re like bureaucrats …” said Don Antoni, with a grin, “they don’t feel like going to the office today.” Sometimes the cats spent the night miaowing mournfully, as if stricken by melancholy nostalgia, and that velvety, finicky sound resonated round moonlit ruins, cadaverous columns, and ghostly arches, with a thrilling timbre. Although he was Greek and knew Greek perfectly, Don Antoni was sensitive to these elemental Romantic explosions. The cats sometimes played games, chased, hissed, and rolled over each other. But there were nights when they did their duty. Then, by the light of a full moon, we witnessed widespread exterminations, fierce battles between cats and rats. On propitious nights, the cats worked into the early hours, with feverish ardor and real rage. On such nights, Don Antoni would unfold the whitest of handkerchiefs, place it delicately on an illustrious stone and sit upon it. I would do likewise. And, smoking our cigarettes, we watched the spectacle.
We walked slowly back late, when the early morning breeze wafted the fresh smell of the pine trees on Pincio towards us. People on Corso were clear-headed, but equally lethargic and drowsy. Groups were gathered around the entrances to the trattorie. Inside the Caffé Aragno, waiters, without their waistcoats, were putting chairs on tables like black and white robots. The odd carrozzella still passed by, transporting sweaty, red-cheeked people bawling next to young ladies and mandolins.
Time passed. Autumn came. The Pensione Fiorentina, that during the summer had been full to overflowing, was still quite empty in early October. In those first cold days, apart from occasional Italian visitors, only the Viennese lady and two bearded Bulgarian engineers who mixed with no one were left in the house. Ida the chambermaid spent her leisure time smoking cigarettes in my bedroom. Now and then she would intervene brilliantly in the noisy scenes in the courtyard. She loved her country, especially her town: Asti. She coughed a lot. Whenever I looked into her dark blue, deep-set eyes, I thought she looked frail.
On the 14th of October – I will remember the day forever more – I read until one A.M. I undressed and got into bed. I couldn’t sleep; I was nervous and chain-smoked nonstop. The clock ticking on the bedside table was driving me mad. I could never sleep on my heart’s side: the slight pressure from the sheet put me on edge: it was an intolerable burden. Whenever I hear my heart, an obsession with death takes over and my imagination considers the possibility I might be buried alive. It may seem pretentious or ridiculous, but that night the anguish and distress provoked by this obsession were exceptional. I got out of bed two or three times. I rubbed my face with eau de cologne. I tried to read the heaviest tome I could find. Finally, exhausted, lips parched, I fell into a deep sleep.
I must have been asleep for some time when a loud bang at the door, made with a hard object – I thought – woke me up. I automatically sat up in bed. The light was switched on, I’d evidently left it like that – carelessly. I was about to jump off my bed to find out what was happening when a second bang, probably a foot kicking the bottom part of the door, suddenly swung one side open. A man was standing on the threshold, silhouetted against the dark passage, holding a shiny object – an object that, the fear coursing through me imagined was a revolver, a revolver aimed, naturally, at where I was sitting. It lasted a moment; he seemed young, was elegantly dressed in black, with a perfect parting on his bare head between shiny, greased hair. I also thought his hard, taut facial features had a healthy color. I don’t remember what I did. I didn’t say a single word. I was filled by a grotesque fear; “grotesque” being exactly the right word! I only remember that after a while, from under the bedding I’d pulled over me, I vaguely heard someone say “pardon” in a French that wasn’t at all nasal. I heard the door creak slightly, very slowly: it was evidently being pulled to. Then a mysterious, profound, heavy silence descended.
It didn’t last long, it was broken by a loud clipped sound that did echo long and loud. I imagined it was a shot that had been fired not faraway, in an adjacent bedroom. I thought the noise would bring all the people in the boarding house rushing. But I heard nobody. The place was almost empty and staff slept on the upper floor. I took my head from under the blankets and opened my eyes. The light had been switched off. A key lay next to the door and I imagined the man with the revolver had turned it before leaving. I peered into the darkness: strips of light shone through the cracks in the door that had merely been pulled to. I imagined that the passage or at least the Viennese lady’s bedroom – the door opposite mine – was open and lit up.
I now jumped bravely out of bed and tiptoed toward the door that I locked, making the least noise possible, with a cold shiver down my spine. Locked in from the inside, I breathed again. The reappearance of light boosted my spirits even more. I looked in the mirror and saw I had the usual color in my cheeks. I lit a cigarette and soon felt sufficiently calm to hear everything happening in the Viennese lady’s room opposite.
For a long time I heard only a muffled conversation, conducted in an angry, scornful tone, by brusque but relatively quiet voices. The dialogue was sustained and quick moving; there were silent moments in the fiery altercation. Then I noted the presence of a third person who was grunting indignantly and a noise as if someone was struggling to get out from under a bed or inside a wardrobe. The words I caught were in German.
The exchange went on for over a quarter of an hour, interrupted by these strange noises. Then it changed from nervous muttering to confused shouting. All of a sudden I heard a woman’s shrill scream and the sound of a body hitting the ground. From then on there were only isolated interjections: shouts accompanied by frantic activity, as if they were anxiously searching the room in a wild free-for-all, throwing open drawers, pushing chairs over, rustling paper, and brusquely forcing open suitcases and locked items. Finally, I hear the characteristic noise of a balcony opening, the balcony that looked over the cul-de-sac. Of course, it wasn’t impossible to make an escape via the balcony. Helped by the guttering to the immediate wall, you could clear the five meters to flat ground. I heard no more words after the balcony was opened. Only steps followed by something that made me extremely curious; I suddenly heard the lady’s bedroom door open onto the corridor and someone tiptoeing cautiously along …
This last unexpected incident gave me my first general view of this business. There are three protagonists, I told myself: a lady and two gentlemen … Someone must have been caught in fraganti, I reflected as I turned in my bed, with an unpleasantly chill feeling in my whole body and an extinguished cigarette on my lip.
These strange events I have recounted were followed by long period of peace and quiet that lasted until the police arrived.
Early the next morning, the whole Pensione Fiorentina was assembled in the manager’s officer before an inspector flanked by two carabinieri wearing three-cornered helmets. The Viennese lady was the only absentee and, of course, she was sick. The manager was beside himself, didn’t know what it was all about, and spoke in an unusual voice as if he was whimpering. The less immediate witnesses were questioned first. Those who’d slept on the fourth floor hadn’t noticed a thing. The flat above was occupied by offices that were empty at night. The maids, who had slept like logs, didn’t have a clue about what had happened.
Then the lady’s nurse was summoned. She was rather an elderly plumpish lady, stiff in manner, with a pale yellow to mauve-purple complexion as is sometimes the case with mature Nordic ladies; her clothes were dingy. She answered the questions put to her in an affected, supercilious manner, occasionally looking round, as if seeking the approval of those sat there. However, most had left, after making statements that had been read out. Only the manager, crestfallen in one corner, and I were left.
I should add that the subsequent questioning seemed rather disorganized and too spur of the moment. I didn’t understand why people were being questioned in front of others. However, as I heard later, first enquiries tend to be relatively relaxed, with a nervousness that is only natural in first exchanges.
The nurse said she’d spent the night in the bedroom wardrobe, that she was more dead than alive, because she’d not been able to overcome her fear.
I was really surprised this lady had spent the night in a wardrobe because she generally slept away from the house. Of course, she stayed over on the odd day, but I’d often bump into her in the passage, after dinner, when she was leaving, after the table had been cleared.
“Were you shut in the wardrobe against your will?” the inspector asked. “No, I decided to climb in. I was scared. The thief seemed crazy and was holding a revolver …”
“Did you see how he fired?”
“No, I just heard it.”
“Where was your lady when the shot was fired?”
“I don’t know … She was in the bedroom …”
“Of course … Do you remember the face of the person who fired? “Vaguely: I think he was swarthy, average height and wore an elegant tuxedo. An Italian … He was a thief.”
“You keep repeating he was a thief. Did you in fact see him grab something, take off with …”
“I couldn’t say. I couldn’t say …”
“Do you recall seeing him anywhere else?”
“Never before last night …”
The policeman summoned me.
“Why was the light on in your room in the early hours?”
“It was an oversight. I forgot to turn the electricity lever.”
“Do you always sleep with your door unlocked?”
“No, sir. That was another unforgivable oversight.”
“Too many oversights, perhaps …”
“I agree.”
“Did you see the thief? Could you describe him?”
“Was he really a thief?”
“Well, whatever he was … Could you describe him?”
“He kicked my door open and stood in the doorway for a while, holding a revolver. I expect he wanted to check whether the surrounding bedrooms were occupied. He looked respectable, was very well dressed, and perfectly self-possessed. If I’d not noticed he was aiming a revolver at me, I’d have deduced he was a sportsman who wanted to play a practical joke on me …”
“Was he tall or short?”
“I couldn’t tell. I was terrified for a moment. I remember his silhouette, but I couldn’t be more precise. I can say he was well dressed because that was what immediately struck me. In our kind of country one always expects someone ordinary looking to appear in these situations. What I do remember clearly is the way his revolver glinted. It was a small, white metal weapon …”
“How long did he stay in room no. 11?
“No more than twenty minutes.”
“Did you hear any fisticuffs?”
“Only the verbal kind.”
“Did you hear the front balcony being opened? Was that the way he made his escape?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you hear any other noise? A car engine starting up, for example?”
“No, sir.”
“From your vantage point, did you notice anything else?”
“Yes, sir. After the balcony was opened, somebody left no. 11 through the door to the passage.”
“Oh!”
“Absolutely true.”
The Pensione Fiorentina saw policemen, inquisitive journalists and all kinds of people come and go throughout the day.
The manager was beside himself and greeted people as if there was a dead body in the house. Above all, that fine man couldn’t understand how his porter, the porter in his renowned hotel, had gone missing from his place of responsibility for most of the night. As a result he was making all manner of wild conjectures. However, only one was valid and coherent: pleasantly relieved by the reduced number of boarders, the porter had decided to spend a couple of hours drinking with friends in the nearest trattoria. That’s natural enough in Italy – or anywhere else!
From all the gossip I heard I gathered the nurse spread the idea that it had the ingredients of a full-blown robbery. That woman volubly promoted this explanation. The Viennese lady kept her thoughts to herself and didn’t let slip even the most basic comment on the subject. It was generally accepted the robbery had been committed by a hotel burglar. The idea seemed so likely and was so easily accepted I thought it must be the kind of clichéd solution people had decided on quite willfully. Rome’s evening newspapers devoted large swaths of their third pages to the crime in the Pensione Fiorentina. Journalists didn’t have the slightest evidence, but they too opted for the theft explanation.
Two days later there was a sensational development. The papers devoted column inches to it; not every single one, to be sure, or those deemed to be the most serious and responsible. Despite the restrictions imposed on the news item, everyone found out, that is, I mean, the countless people gripped by the case. In effect: the papers related that one of the city’s best known, most elegant rakes had gone to police headquarters – people said that he was a ruined Sicilian marquis – and stated that on the night of the 14th of October he had entered bedroom no. 11 in the Pensione Fiorentina with no untoward intent, that he was ready to explain himself to the police and rejected most indignantly the robbery theory that had been broadcast so publicly. “If I stole anything from lady X in the Pensione Fiorentina,” went the note published by the dailies, “I invite the said lady to specify the item that was stolen.”
It would have probably been naïve to expect any kind of response. One never came. The Viennese lady continued to be as self-absorbed and sickly as ever in the boarding house. People claimed the ruined marquis had been arrested. I wasn’t able to confirm that. What really did happen then was this, people buried the journalistic aspect of that business. It suddenly disappeared from the newspapers.
However, the investigation continued.
I was frequently invited to appear at the requisite time in the anteroom in the judge’s office, on Piazza de Gesu. I often bumped into the Austrian lady’s nurse. Sporadically I also came across other elements from the house. The manager had gone from a state of dejection to a state of indignation. He demanded at the top of his voice that the case be closed; in his view, it was damaging his commercial credibility.
The judge’s office was in a huge, gloomy, overbearing Renaissance palace, a labyrinth of corridors, secret or visible little staircases, and countless small and large rooms. Rome’s judiciary was centralized in that enormous barn. The square was slightly away from the bustle of the city; it was peaceful and quiet, and that seemed to make the atmosphere in the palace even more tense and dramatic.
Sometimes, the nurse and I walked along the whole of the glassed in gallery that looked over a courtyard while waiting to be summoned by the judge. It was a deserted courtyard crossed at very irregular intervals by a carabinieri in a three-cornered helmet. The nurse was still of the opinion that it was a common-or-garden robbery. I did nothing to dissuade her. On the contrary: fantasies should be respected. The nurse was sad and extremely dejected.
“Of course, you must be worried about losing your job …” I’d say.
“Naturally! My lady is at her wit’s end. She’ll leave Rome. In fact, she was already planning to do so. I’m old now: it will be hard to find a steady job. I don’t have any simple way out of …” she whimpered, nervously looking for a handkerchief in her black leather bag and wiping a tear away.
“Don’t you have any family?”
“None. I’ve been living in Italy for years.”
“Are you German?”
“I’m Prussian, from Rostock.”
“It must be very pleasant looking after that well-mannered Austrian lady …”
“Absolutely. I love her. She is a good, relaxed person and extremely courteous.”
“Are you really sure she will leave?”
“In her place I’d have already left! The daily papers print only lies and slander. Look at what the thief said!” the poor woman said with a sob, waving her hand as if chasing away a vision of hell.
“But don’t you think your lady might have a lover? A passionate affair? It wouldn’t be at all strange, she’s an experienced woman, I’d say …”
She gave me a look that was both frightened and suspicious.
“I couldn’t give you an answer.”
“Couldn’t or don’t want to?”
“It makes no difference. I can’t enter into the slightest dialogue …!” she retorted forcefully, making that gesture I’d seen her make so often, as if chasing off some dastardly vision.
But it was Don Antoni Logotete who gave me the biggest shock in all the time I spent in the palace on Piazza de Gesu. We bumped into each other in the enclosed gallery. My naïveté made me assume he was there because of something related to his case, the case of the plaster slabs.
“It’s proceeding normally,” he replied stiffly, and added, “My presence here has nothing to do with that. I’ve come to defend the outraged honor of a most respectable lady …”
“You mean the business at the Pensione Fiorentina?”
“Exactly.”
“Do you know the woman from Vienna?”
“She’s a former student of mine, a most distinguished student. I taught her Italian, the little or large amount she knows, do you see?”
“I see. But tell me, do you have a clear idea of what happened? Perhaps you have a more substantial explanation than the various versions that have reached us?”
“I don’t know the facts, but that is of no matter. She is someone I love. I have come to defend the honorable reputation of a lady who is worthy of the greatest respect …”
“I understand … I totally understand …”
The following morning, the magistrate told me no further statements would be necessary and, consequently, there was no point my being in his office. I was delighted to hear that. I would be spared a lot of bother. However, a few days later I discovered Don Antoni was being summoned, repeatedly. Simple eyewitness accounts were replaced by statements of opinion. It was a good sign: it showed the business was now on the right track. Nothing is more pleasing than to see things on the right track. Sometimes, three yards from where you live there’s a huge hue-and-cry and you have a wretched night. However, that’s of no matter. What’s crucial is that everything is on the right track, the indispensable right track
Before bidding farewell to the examining magistrate I dared ask him a few questions. He was an affable, good-hearted, skeptical, stout fellow with great maturity of vision, who smoked cigars in a holder.
“Was there a robbery, your honor?” I asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“Is there a convincing explanation of what took place?”
“Perhaps it was simply a love scene that became rather entangled and far too melodramatic …” the magistrate replied with a vague smile.
My face must have revealed how curious I was to know more. The magistrate gave me a weary look and cheery smile. He then said quite blankly, as if he was talking about the weather: “I think one thing has been established for the moment: the lady in no. 11 and the so-called thief were in a relationship. She had succeeded in finding love. I suspect it was a rather self-interested love. Love cost the lady dear. For a time the relationship developed positively: the suitor was imaginative, knew how to cherish the object of his passion, was intriguing. But, obviously, a moment came when a third person appeared and took control of the situation. The lady had no choice but to let herself be loved by someone else, whom we shall call X, to be brief. The first relationship, where she had more purchase and that was more visible, had to be tucked away. Then what often happens did happen: it transpired that the marquis had really fallen in love. This was the great novelty, the unexpected factor. In short: desperate and at the end of his tether, he decided to go and declare his love. He entered room 11 using his old key. He made an enormous kerfuffle when she refused to renew the old relationship in the manner he’d described. He said, “It’s all or nothing!” like a young fledgling. A peculiar, ridiculous, inexplicable stance. Fortunately the kerfuffle was harmless: he threw papers in the air, opened drawers, pushed chairs over, forced suitcases open … It’s a very Latin way to demonstrate one’s love. Nevertheless, something catastrophic might have occurred, and that’s why childish, scatter-brained folk shouldn’t have easy access to weapons. Then he used the balcony and guttering to reach the street …”
“So what about the person who left via the passage?”
“Let’s simply say it was the gentleman we dubbed X to avoid being longwinded …”
“Did the scene at least serve some purpose?”
“I think so. The lady has rid herself of a nuisance. The suitor reacted positively. You’ll understand: they wanted to pass him off as a thief … A degree of dignity still remains in this world …
A few weeks later, when it all seemed to be over and done with, I met Don Antoni in the Caffé Greco. As I’d nothing more pressing to talk about, I commented on my conversation with the magistrate.
“His is a very bold, not to say rash point of view …” commented my friend after reflecting for a moment, “I was the young woman’s teacher. She was an excellent student. She was punctual, studious, and well organized. She’d had a solid bringing up …”
“Of course!”
“You know I always act in good faith, with my heart on my sleeve.”
“Don’t place yourself under any strain … Would you like a smoke?”
This business at the Pensione Fiorentina was one of my first engagements with the complexities of life. I don’t know if I understood very much, but I learned a lot. Much more than in my years at university, those languid years …