front of his flock for that hawk had sensed (animals tremble before the storm) that the carrion would increase and multiply, that death would enjoy years of plenty, before also ending up in a train, a train between Bolzano and Birkenau, between Trieste and Klagenfurt or between Zagreb and Rome, where time stopped, as it stopped for me on that platform lined with railway cars, furious, panting engines, a pause between two deaths, between the Spanish soldier and the train station with a similar name, as crushing as Ares god of war himself—I light a last cigarette mechanically I have to get ready for the journey, for moving like all the people pacing up and down the platform in Milano Centrale in search of a love, a gaze, an event that will tear them from the endless circling, from the Wheel, a meeting, anything to escape yourself, or vital business, or the memory of emotions and crimes, it is strange that there are no women on the platform at this precise moment, motivated by the memory of Millán-Astray and his bandaged eye I climb into the trans-Italian express that must have been the zenith of progress and technology ten years ago for its doors were automatic and it went faster than 200 kilometers per hour in a straight line on a good day and today, a little closer to the end of the world, it’s just a train: the same goes for all things like trains and cars, embraces, faces, bodies their speed their beauty or their ugliness seems ridiculous a few years later, once they’re putrid or rusty, once up the step now I’m in a different world, plush velour thickens everything, heat too, I left winter by getting into this train car, it’s a journey in time, it’s a day unlike the others, it’s a special day December 8th the day of the Immaculate Conception and I am missing the Pope’s homily on the Piazza di Spagna as a madman comes and announces the end of the world to me, I could have seen the pontiff one last time, seen the spiritual descendant of the first Palestinian leader the only one who got some results, but it wasn’t easy for that skinny whining Levantine who didn’t write a single line during his lifetime, outside on the next track a train is stopping and a pretty girl behind the window has intriguing eyes, I think she’s talking to someone I don’t see, she is very close to me actually a meter away at most we are separated by two dirtyish windows I have to be strong I can’t linger over the faces of young women I have to be resolute so I can gather momentum for the kilometers ahead of me then for the void and the terror of the world I’m changing my life my profession better not think about it, I placed the little suitcase over my seat and I discreetly handcuffed it to the luggage rack better close my eyes for a minute but on the platform policemen mounted on two-wheeled electric chariots like Achilles or Hector without a horse are chasing a young black man who’s running towards the tracks rousing surprise and concern among the travelers, blue angels, announcers of the Apocalypse maybe, astride a strange silent azure scooter, everyone gets out to take in the scene, Pallas Athena and the son of Tydeus rushing at the Trojans, a few dozen meters away from me one of the two policemen reaches the fugitive and with a gesture of rare violence aided by all the speed of his vehicle he hurls the man at bay up against one of the cement posts in the middle of the platform, the captive flattens against the concrete his head bangs into the column and he falls, he falls on his stomach right in the middle of the Milano Centrale station just in time for the second angel to jump on his back and immobilize him, sitting on his lower back the way a farmer or a wrangler ties up a fractious animal, then, back on his machine, he drags the criminal stumbling at the end of a chain to the admiring murmurs of the crowd, ancient scene of triumph, they parade the chained conquered ones behind the chariots of the conquerors, they drag them to the gaping galleys, the black man has a swollen face and a bloody nose his head held high a little incredulous everyone gets back into the car the incident is over justice has triumphed just a few minutes before departure, I glance at the suitcase, I’m afraid I won’t manage to sleep or I’ll be pursued as soon as I doze as soon as I lower my guard they’ll interfere with my sleep or get under my eyelids to raise them the way you open shutters or Venetian blinds, it’s been a long time since I thought of Venice, the green water by the Dogana, the fog of the Zattere and the intense cold when you look at the cemetery from the Fondamente Nuove, back from the war, hadn’t thought of the shadows, in Venice they’re made of wine and drunk in the winter starting at five o’clock in the evening, I see again the Slavic violinists who played for the Japanese, the French in full carnival masquerade, a rich hairdresser from Munich who bought himself a palace on the Grand Canal, and the train suddenly gets underway I lean my head back we’re off over 550 kilometers till the end of the world
II
I let myself fall under the spell of the flat cadence of the suburbs of that city with the name of the predatory Spanish soldier, outskirts of a Northern city like so many others, buildings to cram the proletariat in, immigrants from the 1960s, vertical concentration camps, to the paradoxical rhythm of the cross-ties—I am in Venice in that tiny damp apartment where the only light was in the kitchen the floor was sloping, you slept with your feet in the air which apparently is good for the circulation, it was at the entrance to the Ghetto opposite the bakery in front of the big synagogue where I sometimes heard psalms and songs, sometimes the name of the neighborhood made me afraid, the Old Ghetto, especially at night when everything was deserted and silent, when the bora blew the icy wind that seemed to come straight from the Ukraine after freezing the Czechs the Hungarians and the Austrians, in my Old Ghetto it was impossible not to think of Łódź of Cracow of Salonika and of other ghettos of which nothing remains, impossible not to be pursued by the winter of 1942, the trains to Treblinka, Bełżec, and Sobibor, in 1993 a few months after my own war and exactly fifty years after the extermination, in the Venetian Ghetto shrouded in fog and cold I imagined the German death machine not realizing that one of its last cogs had turned right nearby, a few kilometers away, but if I am thinking now again of Venice in a railway torpor it’s mostly because of the one who had joined me there, the body she so often refused me forced me into long nocturnal walks sometimes until dawn, with my black cap, I passed the Square of the Two Moors, I greeted Saint Christopher on top of the Madonna dell’Orto, I got lost among the few modern buildings that they have over there as if they had been purposefully hidden in secret recesses, as if they weren’t hidden enough by the lagoon, and how many times have I found myself back again having a coffee at daybreak with the pilots and skippers of the vaporetti I didn’t exist for them, Venetians have that atavistic ability to ignore anything that isn’t them, not to see, to make the foreigner disappear, and this sovereign scorn, this bizarre superannuated grandeur of a recipient that lets him completely ignore the hand that feeds him was not unpleasant, on the contrary, it was a great frankness and a great freedom, far from the commercial chumminess that has invaded the whole world, the whole world except Venice where they keep ignoring you and scorning you as if they didn’t need you at all, as if the restaurant owner had no need of customers, rich as he is with his whole city and sure, certain, that other more easily pleased guests will soon come to fill his tables, whatever happens, and that gives him a formidable superiority over the visitor, the superiority of the vulture over its carrion, the tourist will always end up fleeced, dismembered with or without a smile, what’s the use of lying to him, even the baker across from my apartment admitted, without blinking an eye, that his bread wasn’t very good and his pastries overpriced, this baker saw me every day every day for months without ever smiling at me his strength was his certainty of my disappearance, one day I would leave Venice and the lagoon, whether it was after one, two, three, or ten years he belonged to the island and not me, and he reminded me of this every morning, which was salutary, no delusions to maintain, I associated only with foreigners, Slavs, Palestinians, Lebanese, Ghassan, Nayef, Khalil, and even a Syrian from Damascus who ran a bar where students and exiles gathered, he was a former sailor who had jumped ship during a stopover, a rough guy you’d never associate with any sea or any boat, he had a sturdy landlubber’s head with very big ears that I remember as being on the hairy side, he was very pious, he prayed, fasted, and never drank the alcohol he served to his customers, his weakness was girls, whores especially, which he justified by saying that the Prophet had had a hundred wives, that he loved women, and that in short fornication was a fine sin, in Venice I didn’t fornicate much, the winter was endless, damp and cold, hardly favorable to fornication in fact, I remember that the first night in the Ghetto I had no blankets and I was so frozen I rolled myself up in a dusty oriental rug, fully dressed, with my shoes on because the rigid carpet was like a tube and didn’t cover my feet, I read some stories about phantom boats by William Hope Hodgson before falling asleep like a failed fakir or a dead sailor ready to be returned to the
