perhaps from satellite dishes, antennas, awnings. In the apartment below, a man and a woman talked deep into the night. On rare occasions their voices became louder, more feverish, and had I not occasionally heard footsteps, chairs sliding, silence, I would have thought their conversation was television.
In the morning the wind abated, the rain hushed. Through the rear windows I watched day arrive. Above hill crests the sky turned gray, then pink, and against the light of dawn I recognized the inverted outline of the mountains that from Olevano I would see drawn sharply before the setting sun. After the restless night, during which I had nearly forgotten where in the world—in life—I was, that view gave me a foothold, and even a strange kind of comfort I hadn’t expected. From the veranda high above the Viale di Trastevere, I looked onto the back of the Gianicolo, which now lay in the hesitant orange-red light of winter mornings, just as the old town of Olevano would have. Gianicolo, spoken in my father’s voice—the name was suddenly in my ear, adjusting my map of the surroundings. Rome. Trastevere. En route to Cerveteri. I knew once again where the Tiber was from here, where Ostia was, the Appian Way—places that yesterday had been but threadbare memories, spectres wandering about my mind. I was back at a nameable place.
After returning the keys to the Romanian concierge at the lodge, I took a train to Ladispoli. Standing in a sea breeze which blew through the train station’s small forecourt, I looked up at the apartment blocks in their state of winter abandon, and was whisked away to England. Seagulls, wind, a near-turquoise sky, tiny cotton-ball clouds filled with small blue shadows—suddenly Italy was pushed aside. Perhaps it was the way the light above the salty marsh landscape between the sea and the hills shimmered, as it does above every terrain that can’t decide where it belongs: a flat streak above the high, brackish ground-water table, with the sea and the volcanic hinterland tumbling incessantly around it. If you leaned into the wind at the right angle you might even hear a faint click when the dice collided.
The inland bus arrived, the sea remained at my back, and with it all distant similarities to the sky and light of England. Cypresses and pines slipped into view, along with the round summits of the undulating hinterland. All the same, on either side of the road the country remained for some time a universal land. Nurseries, warehouses, small-scale manufacturers along the highways. Via Aurelia carved a route toward Cerveteri, a gray vein that cast out small bulges of commercial areas, as all arterial roads do, where at other times traffic would surely accumulate, and passers-through would find comfort in commodities.
I never went to Cerveteri as a child. M. and I had planned to take this side-trip, a day in Rome, a half-day on the coast—that’s how we had imagined it. Walking between graves. Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis opens in Cerveteri, with a visit to this necropolis, which, as I now saw, was separated by a kind of small plateau—overgrown with low, brambly bushes—from the city of the living, with its inescapable fortress. This small plain in the winter light, too, was punctuated by tumuli. The field of burial chambers—above which the stone domes arched, covered in lichens, grasses, and wild daffodils—must have been enormous, sheer “second homes,” as Bassani put it, which the living prepared or maintained and looked after for their dead, until one day they themselves moved in. The necropolis, this undulating ocean of overgrown domes, each accommodating a family of the dead, appeared much larger than the city of the living, which lay so silent and seemed so sparsely populated as I stepped off the bus.
Only a small part of the necropolis was accessible, old paved paths led between the grave mounds, with groups of trees in one or two places, tiny groves, to one side an expansive view to the sea, to the hills, past additional sepulcher mounds in the pale grass. I knew exactly how we would have walked between these graves together. How we would have entered the chambers, the stony beds, the chambers, how we would have looked at the things depicted with a near–tender accuracy found in the finely crafted two-color reliefs on the walls—as if that were enough, as if the dead would know to reach through the cool thickness of the masonry and touch the object or animal’s other side, invisible to us, and hold it in their life-averted hands.
The burial chambers were oddly ceremonious, perhaps because here I could imagine M. next to me on these paths, his gait and gaze, his voice, more clearly than in any other place yet in Italy. Words from Bassani’s prologue that I had long faltered over came to my mind: l’eternità non doveva più sembrare un’illusione—here eternity could no longer remain an illusion. I am not sure if I understood them any better now, but they had become a picture: stone, moss and grasses, there between the blue-green of wild daffodil leaves, bare stalks before any buds had arrived. Were there snakes here, between the underbrush and the cracked stone, which must be very hot in summer? In warmer months it was likely too loud, from people strolling between the graves.
On my way back to the city of the living, I wondered why my father never brought us here. Tarquina was not far—why hadn’t he turned from Via Aurelia and driven up to the hills? He must have known, after all, what he would find there. Was he familiar with that sentence about eternity, which here could no longer remain an illusion, a fairy tale, a priest’s empty promise?
The sun had meanwhile become sharp and dazzling. Every so often a sudden gust of cool wind blew in from the sea. I sat down at the bus stop by the empty market square and prepared for a long wait. An African man took a seat next to me, looking drawn. He leaned his head against the rear wall of the shelter and I thought he might fall asleep. Had I not been afraid of offending him, I would have stood up and given him the entire bench to sleep on. But after a few minutes he addressed me in French, with the rolling R and flat, nasal accent of a West African. He rustled in a plastic bag. I expected him to offer me men’s socks, but after a crackling search he pulled out sunglasses, crooked and cheap designer knock-offs. He took them out of the bag only halfway, looked at me, and let them slip back inside, without saying a word. Instead he asked what had brought me to Cerveteri. I described the necropolis to him. Perhaps I used the wrong words, in any case he looked at me with an expression so blank that my explanations became embarrassing, and I was relieved when the bus came. The young man didn’t get on, but raised his large hand and waved goodbye to me as the bus drove off. Chronicle of a Summer, I thought once inside the bus. And out the other window: Pasolini. His Notes Toward an African Orestes. That was the last film M. and I saw together. We had mixed up the date and arrived at the cinema to see a different Pasolini film: Uccellacci e uccellini. The Hawks and the Sparrows. We never did watch it together.
Via
I EXITED AT OSTIENSE STATION, grazed by a memory. Glimpses of the backs of houses along the tracks had awoken something in me somewhere, which nevertheless sunk back down once I stepped off the train. Moments later I found myself at the pyramid again. The Appian Way came to mind: a spring morning, decades ago, the white light of high fog streamed through the interstices between dark trees onto the cobblestones, which shone without being wet. It had snowed in Rome the day before, but immediately afterwards spring arrived, and that morning on the Appian Way was quiet and pleasant, remained in my memory and returned in my dreams.
The sky clouded over in the afternoon and a cold wind blew. On that weekday in February the Appian Way was practically empty, save for an occasional car with tinted windows driving to one of the luxury villas located on the grounds behind the gravestones. Perhaps the people in the villas didn’t know that the quarters of the living should remain separate from those of the dead. The routes of the living, the Roman roads leading out into the world and coming from the world up to the city limits were bordered by places of the dead; it was the dead who escorted the living, and not the other way around. And one could speak of lingering in the streets only in terms of eternity, which appeared to be incidental here, which didn’t call out to prove itself not a fairy tale, not an illusion. The dead marked the old streets as places one ought not to linger, as long as one can keep going.
