but the stammering bellow of diesel motors was all the louder for it, and the voices of invisible waiting passengers traveled uphill more distinctly than on clear days, and occasionally I could even understand the names they called.
For some time I entertained the idea of making a trial departure, and one day I took the bus to Rome. It was early morning, twilight had just begun to show faintly. Waiting passengers wore grim expressions, their heads drawn deeply into their coat collars in the light of the street lamps. Several buses exited the tunnel at once, all advertising Rome as their destination and already filled with passengers. Most of them must have been on their way to work or school, an older couple sat speechless, clinging to a small, old-fashioned leather suitcase, and I imagined the woman was perhaps accompanying the man to the hospital. Or the other way around. Below on the plain, dawn had advanced enough that I saw the hoarfrost as a matte, pale layer, covering surfaces without glittering, since the light was still absent. A few passengers exited in Genazzano and Palestrina, scattering in the frosty morning.
The bus passed the Palestrina cemetery. In the reddish morning light it lay like a monstrous bulk among the low houses, garages, shops, and pubs in the lower part of town, which had already begun fringing into something urban, the outskirts of Rome. The bus went as far as Anagnina, the last stop on the metro line. An incremental ritual for approaching the city. I was surrounded by a gray no man’s land, between feeder roads and industrial buildings. Views of an empty region that was neither country nor city, unpopulated, navigated but not settled, smoothed and leveled into a ground of possibility, yet already allotted narrow functions, which withered at every attempted description. A land of eradication, a new alienated terrain, different from Pasolini’s outsider land, damaged by new construction, even more cramped, further beyond recognition, dispossessed of all names.
Regional buses came from all sides, churning out flocks of half-rural inhabitants, mostly women, perhaps employed in shops or offices, and students. Like everywhere else, there were helpless and restless African men, who gathered in small groups—impossible to say if their meetings were arranged by chance or plan. In the icy morning light, they trudged from one foot to the other, looked around, exchanged a few words. Perhaps they were waiting for a sign that they alone would recognize, a signal to move into the city.
On the forecourt of Stazione Termini I suddenly lost all desire for the city. In that moment I vaguely associated it with a disconsolate state, which I could anchor in neither a time nor an exact place; I felt only a cold trepidation, pervaded by pictures of the Tiber, of bridges and views of the naked forlornness of its banks, fully unrelated to the city they abutted. I took a bus and exited at Piazza Bologna, perhaps because the name inspired confidence in me, or because Piazza Bologna itself stirred a different, fully unfixed memory that I hoped to cling to against everything inconsolable, but when I got off I found nothing that offered any kind of welcoming shelter. I walked in a random direction and followed a main road, amazed by its colorless provinciality. There were few pedestrians—at this time of day no one was interested in the shops selling cheap clothes. A handful of young people shoved into small copy shops, and in the matchbox alimentari, where only random customers bought things in passing, Pakistani or Indian women sat by the doors, jammed into their tiny cashier’s corners. Before long I stood at a high wall, behind which I at first expected to find a park, until I saw the flower stands, a larger and more garish version of the kiosks at Olevano cemetery. The stands appeared to arrange their territories by flower color—there was a red, a yellow, and a white territory—and all the flowers looked artificial, but proved on closer inspection to be uniform cultivated varieties, blooming bare and debellished of all unnecessary leaves: gerberas, chrysanthemums, lilies.
An onoranze funebri hearse rolled slowly across the courtyard toward the gate. The procession consisted of five or six cars, covered in city dust, transporting mourners who looked listlessly or sullenly out the windows. Perhaps it was an unloved elderly uncle with an unsettled legacy, for whom handkerchiefs were waved all the same.
I wandered across the enormous Campo Verano cemetery, a densely cultivated graveyard. Here the fornetti walls were like apartment blocks. There were entire estates, interrupted by subsections with magnificent gravestones and mausoleums, their architecture in keeping with the times, from art nouveau to Bauhaus and the brutalist concrete of the 70s. Apartments, houses, villas, palazzi for the dead, an entire city for the dead, with rich and poor quarters and a ladder-sliding, cleaning, flower-planting memorial staff, and all of it enclosed by the arterial roads, street-car lines, and train tracks of the living.
At last I ended up in the Israelitico section of the cemetery. It was sparser, brighter, less acutely marked by black trees and grave pomp, less severely ordered. The wall that segregated this part of the cemetery was fissured where the grave markers were embedded, the ochre-colored plaster had crumbled away, and small old bricks were laid bare. The name that I came across most often on the grave markers was Astrologo, and I had to wonder which stars over Rome might they have found themselves interpreting. On the graves lay stones and pebbles, a few blanched artificial flowers. Overturned flowerpots, cracked medallions with photographs. There, for the first time, it occurred to me: no matter where they were—in Styrian villages, in Olevano, Tarnów, or here at Campo Verano, by the Tiburtina station in Rome—these sepulcher images were a plea not to be forgotten, an anxious call of the visible, which arose with the invention of photography and wanted to be more powerful than any name. I imagined those who had always been forced to count every penny, who brought what money they had left to the photographer in order to have a picture on their grave. Or those who, already half-consumed by sickness, waylaid the first available itinerant photographer they could find—and the fear of those who had neither time nor money enough. And then there was the task of having this photograph turned into an enamel medallion: a burden placed on the bereaved. What a burden, what sorrow this picture brought about. It wanted to catch the eyes of those who came after at all costs, to shout out to them something that the written word didn’t seem, no longer seemed, capable of expressing.
Cerveteri
I SAT IN THE TRAM watching the cemetery wall glide past, followed by the crumbling facades of rundown houses, then wide boulevards lined with bare trees and climbing grassy stretches, which from far away appeared familiar yet remained nameless. The fractured memories flooding my mind were placeless until I saw the pyramid, and behind it the wall of the cemetery with John Keats’s grave. The pyramid of my childhood memory was different: it was smaller, an endless string of cars driving around it, and at the same time it was a sharper sign than this one. The erector of this tomb ascribed the foreign to himself for all eternity. In Palestrina, while looking at the Nile mosaic, the pyramid hadn’t crossed my mind. The Nile valley had left a trail through Rome—I’d forgotten that.
I continued to Trastevere, where I had arranged a place to stay. The apartment was in a sixties block, as I knew them from films with blonde women wearing big sunglasses and scarves around their heads who would step out of doorways like this one and take a seat on the back of a Vespa. A heavy gate, marble steps. In one corner was a Christmas tree that had seen better days, without lights, only a bit of tinsel still hanging from its artificial branches. A concierge from the Danube delta in Romania pointed me to the elevator and, when I asked, advised me where to buy groceries. The Romanian woman, who wanted to be addressed by an English-sounding name that she had given herself, sat in a small, bright lodge at the end of the dimly lit entrance hall. From there she must have always had the cast-aside Christmas tree in sight, and I imagined that every day she waited for someone to pick it up, carry it into the basement, or otherwise dispose of it. The darkness brought rain and heavy winds, which I had to brace myself against while crossing the intersection at Trastevere train station on my way to the shop. People poured out of buses, trams, the train station, all traveling downhill to the opposite side of the tracks. A nowhere-land began there, with broad arterial roads, supermarkets and apartment blocks, their windows mostly dark. In the obliquely falling rain I lost all sense of the place where I found myself.
At night the wind howled about the attic apartment. Rain
