MONDAY WAS MARKET DAY in Olevano. Serving as the market square was the concrete area next to the school, situated at the foot of the hillsides, which were developed only after the tunnel was excavated. At some point it must have been located at Piazzale Aldo Moro, long before the square was given this name. Every town in Italy has an Aldo Moro square, and each one seems to have been torn from some pleasant former purpose, eclipsed by the shadows the new name cast. The tunnel, which had transformed Olevano into a through-town and led through the rock, couldn’t have been more than a few decades old. Had my father ever found a reason to take us to Olevano, we might have discovered another village at the end of the winding—perhaps never-paved—road, which looked only to the west and toward Rome. Small paths would have led along the ridge and through the village to the hinterland, past the house where I was staying, which now sat directly above the tunnel entrance on the hill. There, curious hikers from foreign parts could walk to the Villa Serpentara in the holm oak hills and to Bellegra. The tunnel undoubtedly shifted and distorted the Olevanesi’s maps. How strange it must have been to suddenly be able to go through the mountain instead of having to ascend and descend it. The tunnel was a damp pipe, which always smelled of diesel fumes from the buses. It was not long, but very narrow, and described a slight curve. Quickly it became the pride of the village—after its construction it was a frequent subject of postcards. Yellowed black-and-white photographs on the matte, sturdy cardboard of earlier days, their borders once-white, show the entrance of the illuminated tunnel at night: the opening of the mountain, crusted round with craggy cliffs, lights reflecting on wet asphalt, no vehicles or pedestrians in sight. Pictures of forbidding nights. After the tunnel construction was complete, Olevano performed another act of land reclamation: the drained flatland between thousands of river arms flowing near the sea. Houses were built on the back hillsides, which surely had once been forested, and at the bottom of the small valley, where a number of rivulets converged from the mountains, everything was asphalted, the stream courses buried beneath the school, beneath the sports field and the market square, which was occasionally used for other public events. The rivulets crept to a stretch of water, united at the edge of the leveled land, and at the foot of a rocky slope, overgrown with bushes, they flowed farther downhill between blackberry vines and willow thickets. On the terrace-like expanse above the slope were houses, their balconies and loggias hanging directly above the precipice. In many places along the road to Bellegra, similar reckless developments had cropped up, which, seen from the rear windows of my apartment, appeared unsystematic and disordered—clusters of houses, apartment blocks, skeletons of buildings partly gnawed away by time and weather in a raw state of incompletion. Dimly glowing street lamps signaled the unfinished streets which might never had names, and even in the completed houses I rarely saw an illuminated window. The terrain lay raw in the light of day and dismal by night, perhaps even inconsolable over its utter ineptitude, suited neither as landscape nor shelter.
From my veranda every morning I saw people coming from the westward small plain, where the vegetable gardens lay beneath hoarfrost. By bike or small delivery wagon, occasionally even by donkey, the vegetable gardeners brought their produce to the village. Artichokes, puntarelle, black cabbages, and endives. After the nightly white frost, a residue from the smoke plumes of olive fires would descend on it throughout the day. The vegetable farmers made rounds to the small shops and occasionally brought something to the Arab store, but they never made it to the market place, which was reserved for delivery vans and pick-up trucks, from which all the goods and fixtures for the stands were unloaded in the blink of an eye. On Monday mornings the sound of stands being assembled carried up to my apartment; the merchants were experienced, they constructed the same stands with the same hand movements in a different place every day, offered and sold the same goods—an inexhaustible supply of polyester pillows and fleece blankets, aluminum cooking pots and teacups embellished with sentimental, pseudo-Chinese sayings in bad English. A few stands selling citrus fruit and potatoes could be found as well, and from time to time a merchant hawking hundreds of tiny cactuses. There were also other items with the appearance of utility: kitchen accessories made from colorful synthetics, fake-leather jackets and faux-fur coats, hand towels, sponges and cleaning towels. The clientele at the marketplace was so scarce that I could hardly fathom how the merchants brought themselves to make the trip anew every Monday. Between the market and the road was a long, connected row of low buildings, medical facilities with X-ray labs, ECG clinics, a dentist’s office, an urgent care clinic that treated minor accidents like lacerations, slight scalds, and falls from step-ladders and, as it appeared to me, these facilities also provided the market with most of its customers. The spouses of ECG candidates whiled away the wait-time there, and the injured, freshly trussed, looked for cheap band-aids to cover their lacerations after the gauze came off, searching with stiffly and conspicuously bandaged hands.
Meanwhile in the anterior, old, south and westward-facing part of the village, African men hung about Piazzale Aldo Moro on market Mondays, seeking buyers for three-packs of socks or men’s underwear. When the weather was nice they would drift slowly with their goods past the elderly, who sunned themselves there, and afterwards try their luck with the young women who brought their children to the playground. Around noon necessity compelled them to be bolder, and they entered the small shops in the lower part of the village and addressed customers purchasing parmesan, oranges, or notebooks, risking the anger of shop owners and employees. I never saw anyone make a successful transaction. I once watched a group of African men meet in a neglected corner at the edge of the playground around lunchtime in order to stuff the socks and underwear back into a black plastic bag. One of them shouldered the bag, while the others searched the ground for cigarettes, rummaged through the trashcans for something to eat and triumphantly pulled out a box of rejected pizza crusts. Then they walked to the bus that would bring them back to Cave, Palestrina, or the suburbs of Rome; they probably hadn’t made any money, and tomorrow would try their luck elsewhere with the socks. They never begged and their polite phrases, uttered in a practiced, singsong Italian, which they must have known, after all, almost never worked, gave them a thin veneer of belonging. I never bought anything from them, even though every Monday I intended to; I had no use now in my life for men’s socks, and feared that such a sympathy purchase would tug at my leaden heart even harder than artichokes and oranges. But the African vendors and I occasionally exchanged sideways glances, and I imagined that we mutually recognized, sized each other up as actors on a stage of foreignness—surely unnoticed by the locals—each concerned with his own fragmented role, whose significance for the entire play, directed from an unknown place, might never come to light.
Hands
EACH MORNING I awoke in an alien place. Behind a tall mountain with snow lingering in its hollows, the day broke, gray and blue, sometimes turquoise and yellow. Fog often still covered the plain, at times in individual drawn-out banks, which looked like frozen bodies of water. Each morning it was as if I had to learn everything anew. How to unscrew the moka pot, fill it with ground coffee and turn on the burner, cut bread and set the table, even for the smallest meal. Memories of actions drummed against the top of my skull, as if a sea were swashing inside there, and they rose from its depths, distorted. Dressing. Washing. Applying bandages. The imposition of my hands.
I stood at the window, waiting for the water in the moka pot to boil. I looked out onto the village and the plain, which extends to the chain of dormant volcanic mountains; beyond that I pictured the seaside, even though I knew it was farther away. The expansiveness of the plain was an optical illusion—I had seen for myself that a small hill ridge lay before Valmontone—but this flat terrain, where tucked between woods and groves were small villages and farmsteads, workshops and supermarkets, and an oil mill, closed due to the olive tree disease, was a connected basin for me, a former lake whose water had once slipped away somewhere unknown, and in whose bed, while raking through the ashes from the olive fires and the crumbly soil beneath, you would readily find the remains of fish and other water creatures.
When after sweeping the landscape my gaze fell to my hands on the window ledge, I thought I saw M.’s hands beneath them, in the space between my fingers—white and delicate and long, his dying hands, which were so different from his living hands, and
