IT WAS 6:00 P.M. A weary, sullen tide of workers streamed from office buildings, homeward-bound. Early September, Rome, but the temperature and humidity felt closer to July.
Isobel Cattaneo lay wearily against the backseat of the taxi. It was not air-conditioned and the leather seats were hot. The driver, a fiery Sicilian, sat sweltering in his undershirt, cursing the demonic, heat-crazed traffic. The front windows were rolled down as if to gather any available breath of air.
Isobel’s head rolled right and left against the backseat. Eyes closed, head pounding, she was certain she was about to be sick with the next swerve of the car. The thin shift she wore was damp with sweat; the elastic of her light undergarments chafed her skin.
She’d had a bad day. In fact, a bad three days, shooting a TV commercial for a line of “quality” plumbing fixtures: “Lumenetti’s Luxury Kitchens and Bathrooms.” Worse than the kitchens and bathrooms was the arrogant young director, convinced he was Fellini and given to tantrums and intimidation.
It was the sort of thing she’d done far too much of in the past and swore she’d never do again. This time when her agent called, she’d declined. When he called back within an hour to say that he’d extracted the promise of an extortionate sum from the producers if he could secure her services, she’d declined again. The agent was relentless. If she’d just do this job as a favor to him, he guaranteed he’d never book her for such a thing again, and, moreover, he’d have a play for her in the fall.
All of her better instincts had been to say no. But if the promise of a play in the fall was genuine, she would somehow endure.
It seemed that the storyline of the commercial involved a reenactment of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Isobel in a transparent body stocking was to rise from the sea in a Lumenetti bathroom sink sculpted into the shape of a scallop shell. No doubt that’s why the producers were so determined to have her. Most Roman casting directors, when looking about for a classic Renaissance type, invariably thought of Isobel Cattaneo first.
She didn’t mind the near nudity. She was used to that, as well as to Italian male directors with their well-known penchant for contriving reasons to get an actress out of her clothing. She was more angry with her agent, who apparently had so little regard for her acting skills as to permit her to get dragged into the situation in the first place.
But what particularly bothered her was this neophyte young director with his shrill voice and his mincing, lisping manner grandly ordering her about. No doubt his uncle was Mr. Lumenetti, That’s the way such things generally worked.
Add to all that the fact she’d had a call that afternoon from Fiesole. Erminia was nearly hysterical. Tino had taken money from her purse. He’d come in from the studio, filthy and muttering. Something about his gallery owner cheating him out of his commissions. When she’d told him he was tracking up the kitchen floor, which she’d just washed, he threw a glass at her. This was the second or third time he’d stolen from her purse. She would not come back to work unless the signorina reimbursed her. She knew it was hopeless to expect him to pay her back.
Isobel sighed. Between the heat of the cab, the obnoxious little jingle director, and now Tino’s pathetic pilferings from a poor housemaid, it was all getting to be a bit much.
She knew it was time to get rid of Tino. The whole thing was misbegotten from the start. What had ever possessed her? Of course, he could be quite charming. But, recently, with luck running against him, the charm was more likely to become abuse, and expressed in ways she could no longer tolerate.
What had she been thinking when she’d brought him home, permitted him to move in? His ways were uncouth. Wherever he went in the house, he left a trail of debris behind him. Expecting people to clean up after him, he behaved like a spoiled child. Part of the time he was sullen, the other part, nasty. It was time to face facts. She had to get rid of him, even if it meant getting the police to throw him out.
The throbbing of her head distracted her from her brooding. When she looked up again, she was surprised to see it had gone full dusk. Lights had begun to flicker from the windows of buildings and shopfronts. Buses now lit gasped past, crammed to the gunnels with passengers limp from the heat, clinging to overhead straps and looking as though they were pasted to the windows.
The taxi was climbing a hill, actually hurtling upward, quite fast. The heavy traffic around the Forum had given way and the driver gunned the engine. All the while he hurtled forward, he kept muttering to no one in particular.
They were on the Quirinal, climbing the steep cobbled embankment of Via XX Settembre. They had to cross it in order to get back to her hotel. Something in her became excited in ways not entirely pleasing to her. With that came the odd sensation of time sliding backward, along with the streetlights zooming past outside the taxi.
She was ten years younger, having just completed with honors her second year at the university. Sitting in a ball dress in which she felt foolish, in the back of a taxi, just as she was now, she was going to a dinner party at Palazzo Borghini. Her first time there—the count himself had invited her.
He’d come to the university as a spokesman of the National Alliance. There’d been violent protests when it was learned that he was to speak. Christian Democrats and Communists kicked up an awful row. Chanting and shouting rose outside the lecture hall: “FASCISTO … FASCISTO … FASCISTO.”
It had been an unusually warm day. The windows in the lecture hall stood open to catch what little air there was. “FASCISTO. FASCISTO.” The simple word shouted over and over again drifted upward from the quadrangle below along with the wail of sirens. The police had cordoned off the mobs, threatening at any moment to charge the building.
The man at the center of all of this chaos, the man she’d come there to hear, Count Ludovico Borghini, was a member of one of the most ancient and venerated families of Italy. He was an admitted fascist and despised. His family was said to have been closely associated with Mussolini during the war, and had collaborated with the Germans during the occupation. The colonel himself argued for a curb on many of the rights of the people, a curb on the waves of Third World immigrants currently flooding the country, a curb on the press, and an expansion of powers for the police and the military.
Borghini’s views were deemed to be so extreme that even members of his own family had publicly disavowed them. At the time Isobel came to know him, he was already an outcast. That, doubtless, was part of the attraction for her. So was she, and by her own choice.
She watched him on the podium where he stood, a prematurely gray, impeccably tailored presence. Small. Smaller than she. Having read so much about him and knowing his views when she first saw him, she came close to laughing. It was simply so incongruous.
A great deal of what he said she scarcely understood. He spoke about politics, the church, Italian history, particularly that of the fifteenth century. When he spoke of Savonarola, his eyes appeared to glow. Afterward, she went up to the podium, where a few others milled about, asking him questions. All the while he spoke, he kept glancing at her, until she became keenly aware of his interest, his eyes holding hers, so that after a while some subtle thread of understanding had bonded them. After the others had drifted off, she finally approached him.
For a man with such hateful thoughts (much of his thinking was hateful to her—elitism, exclusivism, right is might), she was nonetheless drawn to his longing for an Italy long gone, for a less cynical, less mercenary Italy, for people who placed the love of ideas above the love of things. After all, she had come from one of the powerful merchant families herself and was diametrically opposed to the glib, fashionable new socialism that many people of her age and class had embraced.
Later, he gave her his card. “If you get to Rome someday, call.” She sensed that he liked her.
A motor scooter shot past the taxi and cut out in front of them. The driver blared his horn and jammed on the brakes. There was the squeal of metal grinding and almost instantly the smell of burning rubber. She was hurled forward, hard up against the back of the front seat, shaken but unhurt. The driver’s head was out the side window, spewing obscenities after the driver speeding rapidly into the gaudy twilight up ahead.
They sat pulled over to the side, where the driver scribbled something into his book. When she looked out, she was startled to find that they had stopped almost directly across from the Palazzo Borghini. She asked the driver to pull over for a moment.
The place was not as she recalled it. For one thing, it now seemed closer to the street—almost exactly where the Via del Quirinale crosses the Via della Quattro Fontane.
That first night when she’d gone there, she recalled a far more gracious expanse of open space around the palace. She was surprised now to discover that it was wedged somewhat clumsily between two official-looking buildings, dwarfed by one and overshadowing the other.
Her first impression, years before, was that it was a larger, more imposing structure. That might have been due to the fact that she was younger and more impressionable, more inclined to amplify and romanticize things.
Looking out the taxi window, the place looked a bit tatty—unkempt, unattended to. The gardens, at one time a source of pride to the Borghinis (and Contessa Borghini’s particular joy), had been allowed to ran to seed.
In fact, the whole place, still impressive as architecture, had the down-at-the-heels look of derelict property. If not for the single light glowing faintly in a corner window, she would have guessed the place was unoccupied. There was a dark, inhospitable look about it, a rueful air heightened by the spear-point wrought-iron gates that stood shut and unwelcoming against the approaching night.
Just beyond the gate and standing off to the side of the large circular drive, she glimpsed a vintage Hispano Suiza. Battered and looking every bit its age, the car, once the pride of the late Count Ottorino, was a sure sign that Borghini himself was in residence, no doubt the lone occupant of the corner downstairs room where the single light burned against the vast façade of the building.
“Signorina?”
The note of impatience in the driver’s voice roused her from her musings. The man was hot, still infuriated by the motor scooter driver who’d nearly wrecked them, and, no doubt, anxious to get home to his family and supper.
“Yes. I’m sorry. Drive on,” she said.
As they pulled out, she glanced back in time to catch the notched outline of the palazzo against the pale, starless sky of early evening. Turning a corner into the Via Francesco Crispi, the last thing she saw was the tiny orange light flickering in the vast encroaching darkness.
Isobel had misread the significance of the single light flickering that night in a corner window of the Palazzo Borghini. Quite naturally, she’d concluded that the colonel was in residence—somewhere behind the massive masonry of the building.
In point of fact, Borghini was not there. He was, instead, some six or seven miles away, gathering with a handful of young braves at an hosteria in the Parioli district not far from the Quattrocento galleries.
It was a Friday night, the end of the workweek for Borghini. There were no activities scheduled for the next day, and so the colonel felt a certain sense of release. Tonight, he was surrounded by a handful of young louts around whom he felt most comfortable. With their shaved heads and black shirts, they were of that ilk known to the freedom-loving Italians as “Nazi skins.” What these twenty-year-olds found so irresistible in a middle-aged colonel was due in large part, no doubt, to the fact that he spent freely, and then, too, with the colonel there was always the promise of excitement.
Here was Luccabrava; Buonofaccio; Vicenti Picarello, known among his fellows as “the Whip”; Baddamente of the gentle nature and fists of steel; Canova; Corsi; Tenuto, who bore the sobriquet “the Spokesman,” so called for his eloquence in articulating the political and moral platform of the group. Finally, there was young Beppe, the baby of the group, perhaps the rawest and most untamed, the one to inspire most caution.
They’d gathered there at roughly 8:00 P.M. and proceeded to eat and drink with a certain seriousness. The staff in the kitchen and the waiters had all been put on the alert. The colonel was known to insist upon perfection. That was all right, of course. But more disturbingly, the group as a whole had a reputation for unpredictability.
By nine or half past nine that evening, the maestro’s tongue had grown looser. Encouraged by his banda, he’d launched into a number of pet diatribes—the fading glory of Italy; Italy as a Third World nation; why Italy must forsake industrialization. Industrialization had fouled everything about them. Italy must return to an agrarian economy; Italy must go back to monarchy. Republicanism had failed Italy; the professional bureaucrats who governed the nation were inept and corrupt; the streets of Rome were an open sewer, swarming with rude Third World blacks and other undesirable ethnic types, all plundering the national treasury. Such people produced nothing but dirt and social problems. Any gesture of generosity they viewed as weakness and an invitation to demand more. He likened these immigranti to a running sore.
Mesmerized by his own eloquence, Borghini pounded the table. The youths grew raucous. The innkeeper, who knew Borghini, began to show signs of nervousness. But he also knew the man well enough not to interfere. Borghini’s “louts” could be quite nasty when the honor of the maestro was challenged. So instead, he brought out plate after plate and bottle after bottle—his oldest and finest Brunellos and Barolos.
Offended by the noise, other diners asked to have their tables changed or paid their bills and left. But by then, Borghini and his small clique of admirers were too drunk to notice.
Sipping his after-dinner grappa, his tongue loosened and he grew more relaxed. He leaned back, tie loosened, collar opened, and began to speak of his mother. Bach sentence would begin: “My mother used to say …” or “My mother was a great one for …” He would turn next to his father. “My father, of course, was one of the original founders of Salo—I might say the original founder.
After his mother and father, in order of importance came Savonarola, the mad monk who had burned books and paintings in fifteenth-century Florence because they fostered a worldliness that led to atheism and immorality.
Savonarola would usually coincide with the appearance of his third grappa. By the fifth, the colonel would be maudlin. For those who’d sat through these intimate little suppers with him before, they knew this to be the signal for him to lapse into meandering reminiscences, by which time tears would glisten in his bleary eyes.
It was nearly midnight when they lurched out of the little hosteria, leaving in their wake a litter of broken glass and spilled food. The area about the table where they’d dined looked as though a herd of cattle had pastured there.
The colonel had signed his IOU over to the innkeeper, assuring him that payment would be in the mail the next day. The innkeeper could do little more than nod his head deferentially, a queasy smile frozen on his face. He well knew that payment would be a long time coming, if, indeed, it ever came at all. He also knew it was best to swallow his bile and say nothing, rather than tangle with the colonel and his boyish thugs. To be sure, one dared not go to the police, for the colonel had friends in high places, and if some poor aggrieved innkeeper were so rash as to file a complaint, the next day he might find his license to operate suddenly withdrawn—the reasons given, health violations or some trumped-up, nebulous charge.
Full of wine and grappa, the maestro, having eaten and talked himself out, expressed a desire to walk. The night was cool. A breeze had started up off the river and felt like a kiss rushing past his feverish, pounding temples.
The group surged out onto the street, singing bawdy songs. People out for a stroll, returning from cinemas and late-night dinners, gave them a wide berth. They made a fairly menacing picture—six or seven burly louts, not exactly unkempt, but bordering on it, accompanied by a smallish middle-aged man swaggering along with a cocky stride, all apparently relishing the uneasiness they caused in any passerby.
Somewhere near the old Jewish quarter, hard by the Tiber, the group had started to jog, then ran. Someone had snatched an old newspaper out of a trash can and, with bits of string salvaged from carton wrappings found in the gutter, fashioned a ball from it. Shortly, they were barging down the street, playing soccer—kicking their paper ball and banging off one another, their hoots and jeers rising upward into the gaudy night, the small, slight, older individual in the group far more boisterous than his younger companions. He was determined to show that not only could he keep up with his young bucks; he had the physical stamina to exceed them by far.
In the vicinity of the Via Monte de Cenci, they grew more riotous. People on the street, coming out of Piperno and da Giggetto, looked anxiously for taxis and tried hard not to notice.
Not far from Piperno, one of them kicked the paper ball, exploding it into a blizzard of downward-drifting confetti, dusting their hair and the collars of their jackets. They punched out at the slow, drifting white stuff, flailing the air like shadow boxers and roaring with delight. When the blizzard had slowed to a few stray wisps swirling idly about them; the group suddenly looked up, to find themselves in front of the Jewish temple—the old Sinagoga Ebraica on the Lungotevere dei Cenci.
Angular, massive, and thrusting, the ancient masonry loomed above them, jutting out above their heads into the street. Dark and silent, it appeared to sleep deep within the mystery of centuries past.
Realizing for the first time where he was, the maestro gestured for all of his revelers to be silent. He pressed a finger against his lips as if calling for respect before this venerable house of worship.
At once, the group fell silent. They watched the maestro intently, with glints of mischief in their eyes, anticipating that something special was about to take place.
In the next moment, Borghini, a wicked smirk across his face, tiptoed stealthily up the front steps. The others watched, transfixed, as the small, plucky figure opened his trousers and urinated against the big oaken front door of the ancient building.
Cars swept past, speeding up the Lungotevere, momentarily lighting up the strange scene, then sped on. For the little banda, it was different. They roared with delight, cheering on their patron—the maestro, a figure of striking dignity, his trousers open, underpants extruding through the unbuttoned fly, pissing against the front door of an ancient, holy building.
Suddenly, they broke out into cheers and hoots of laughter, rushing the door, baying like cats, all urinating at once.
From there, they proceeded north along the river embankment in the direction of Hadrian’s tomb. They sang marching songs and had begun a game of leapfrog down the streets. A few blocks up from the synagogue, one of the youths stumbled, nearly toppling over. When he went back to see what he’d stumbled on, he discovered it to be a foot sticking out from the doorway of a florist’s shop. On closer inspection, the foot was found to be attached to the leg of a vagrant asleep under a pile of newspapers in the doorway.
“What have we here, lads?” Borghini waded into the group, pushing the others aside. He jabbed the newspapers skittishly, as if fearing he might soil the tip of his shoe with some filth below. A faint groan arose from somewhere beneath the papers. “I believe we’ve stumbled upon another victim of social injustice.”
There was sniggering and some boyish shoving as the group surged in closer around the doorway.
With the tip of his boot, Borghini swept the assorted odds and ends of paper aside, revealing beneath them the figure of an elderly man sleeping. Borghini knelt down beside what appeared to be a mound of rags. “Who has a match?” he asked.
Tenuto, crouching above the maestro, ignited a butane lighter and handed it down to him. Almost at once, a shaft of pale orange light rose from the ground up, casting a wavering light on the walls and ceiling inside the doorway. The shadows of the flame, greatly magnified, danced all about them.
The old man sprawled on the ground stirred drowsily. Half-rising, he fell back again, covering his eyes against the sudden unwanted light.
From where he was kneeling beside the old fellow, Borghini could smell the fetor of cheap wine and old clothing in which the man had fouled himself.
“He stinks,” Luccabrava muttered.
“Shit his pants,” another remarked.
Borghini moved the lighter down close to the old fellow’s face. It was a worn, tired face, deeply lined, scored even in sleep with the cares of a lifetime. He’d been cuffed about some; one of his eyes was swollen and purple; clots of dried blood spattered his forehead. The face itself was wreathed in a halo of filthy white beard. A gash of something crusty and yellow marked where the mouth ought to be. Within that gash, a ruin of brown stumpish teeth was just visible. A limp hand grimed with filth barely held on to a paper bag, out of which the neck of a near-empty bottle protruded.
No longer quite so amused, Borghini’s face had taken on a profoundly sad expression, as if there on the ground within that narrow frame of the doorway, he’d glimpsed the clearest picture of man’s fate. One of Giorgione’s Christs flashed before his eye—the Deposition from the Cross. He gazed long and hard at the scene, as if trying to memorize every shadow of it, each detail.
The Count rose and again jabbed the sleeping figure with his booted toe. “Hey, old man. Get up.”
The next time, it was a kick, placed squarely in the ribs. It must have hurt. The old man yelped and half-rose, then rolled to his side, trying to protect himself.
“Get up, you old shit. Get up.” Borghini grew furious, the others crowded about, laughing. Borghini started kicking him again. “Come on, you stinking, lice-ridden bug-life. Get up.”
The old man was either too drunk or too far gone to respond. He’d huddled himself into something like a fetal position, resolved to take the beating if only they’d let him sleep.
“I think we shall do this old man a favor.” Borghini had lapsed into the expansive locutions of stage farce. “I think he’s earned it. Wouldn’t you say, lads?”
“He has indeed, maestro,” young Beppe agreed. “This poor old trooper has been a victim far too long.”
The others crowded in, sniggering. A few of them kicked the prone figure.
“Far too long, maestro.”
“It isn’t fair.”
“How can we repay him for all he’s been made to suffer?”
“What can we do to redress the wrong, maestro?”
“I think,” the colonel began, his head tilted sideways as he mused aloud, “we shall do this poor tragic soul the supreme honor …”
“Yes, maestro.”
“The supreme honor, yes, maestro.”
“We shall martyr him,” Borghini said, his features aglow with a beatific light.
Cheers and roars of delight went up. Cars roared up the Aventino.
“By all means. Let’s martyr him. He’s earned martyrdom.”
They’d taken up the chant, their voices rising boyish and giddy above the roar of the river below.
“Luccabrava,” Borghini cried. “Get me some ash. Over there in the trash cans.”
A number of trash cans had been put out for the collection in front of a nearby office building. The trash had already been burned in the building’s incinerators, and the residue left behind was a cold mound of powdery ash.
Luccabrava, a stout, eager youth in his early twenties, returned with a huge fistful of the stuff, which he offered to the maestro. Borghini, regarding the opened fist with a look of quiet pleasure, moistened the tip of his finger with his tongue, then dipped it into the powdery mound, twisting it right and left several times until it was covered with a dark grayish paste.
Once more, the colonel knelt beside the sprawling figure, who was now snoring faintly, hiccupping a brownish fluid into his flowing scraggly beard. Smiling down and leaning over him, the colonel carefully inscribed the letters INRI across the old man’s forehead. When he’d finished, Borghini leaned back again to admire his work. Then he stood. “Okay, lads. Lift him.”
Hands reached out, grabbing the old fellow at different parts of his body. Borghini himself took the area under each armpit. For some reason, the taller boys had gravitated toward the feet and lower limbs, the net effect of which was that the body was hoisted with the legs higher than the head. Indeed, the area of the head, where Borghini alone stood, hung low; the long mane of filthy white hair drooping almost vertically downward swung from side to side, sweeping the cobbled roadway across the Lungo.
Airborne and in motion, the old man appeared to waken, to sense finally some hint of danger before him. In his fear, he started to moan and thrash about. But they held him firm, marching across the Lungo in the direction of the embankment. All the way, they sang cheers and old party rallying songs.
“Hey, what’s up?” The old man flailed helplessly. “What’s going on? Give an old wreck a break, will you! For Christ sake.”
“We intend to, father,” Luccabrava reassured him kindly, “a big break.”
The others howled with delight.
A shallow stone wall marked the embankment. It served as a kind of guardrail for the safety of pedestrians. Beyond that lay a steep dirt parapet towering some seventy feet above the Tiber.
In the darkness, one could scarcely see the river below, but its churning could be heard. Recent heavy rains had swelled it, and its badly roiled current thrashed about, slapping hard against the rocks and boulders littering the streambed. Where the foaming, current swirled past, it was possible to see whitecaps bobbing downstream like tiny fleeting phantoms.
Reaching the embankment, they peered down over the stone wall. The roar of it had sobered them for a moment as they stood about silent and puzzled, not entirely certain what to do next.
“All right, lads,” Borghini barked. “Hoist this bag of shit high. We’ll launch him up to heaven in grand style.”
They did so eagerly. The old tramp was fully awake now, panicked and thrashing his legs.
“Listen—I meant no harm. Let me go. I’ll be out of your way in a minute.” The whites of the old man’s eyes rolled in his head.
“Over the side with him now, lads,” Borghini directed. “That’s good. Good. Now hold him aloft there just like that till I give the signal to launch him.”
Borghini could hear the old fellow whimper as they hoisted him over the top of the wall and held him dangling and kicking, eyes glaring down at the yawning space below. Leaning out over the wall, the maestro shouted to him above the roar.
“It’s better this way, old soldier. Better than some cold doorway at night. You’re going to like where you’re going. The gates of heaven. Far better than this piss hole down here. Trust me on this, old chap.” He snapped off a sharp military salute to the scrawny figure squirming above the dark void.
“All right, lads. One … two … and three.”
For the briefest moment, it looked like a large bird hovering in space. Then there was nothing, just a black emptiness where seconds before the old tramp had squirmed and wriggled like a hooked fish.
In the sky across the river, still glowing red from the lights of Trastevere, Colonel Ludovico, Borghini watched in wonder a hand holding a sword. He watched it cleave the clouds, moving slowly back and forth as if saluting him. There was thunder and a rush of rain and he thought he heard a child crying.