The New Adventures of Sinbad the Sailor

by Salim Bachi

  I walked to Piazza Navona to take my mind off things. Here, as well, clouds of horseflies twitched over the magnificent circus and around the Fountain of the Four Rivers: Bernini facing off against Borromini, then taking fright. The place was submerged under the reds, yellows and greens of the umbrellas used to guide the oxen traipsing past like a strange species of centipede. Various painters had set up their ridiculous easels to sketch the stuck-up American cows, attracted by the smell of death, who thought Rome so romantic. The Immobile Pope had just joined the Polish angels and was hanging over the city like the stench of decomposition, intensified by the mingling sweat of millions of holidaymakers gathered here in pursuit of eternity.

  “Who are you then?”

  “Just a tourist… like all the rest.”

  Not like the rest. I stayed here to drink this town to the dregs and die here, unable to pull myself free. Rome and Italy were buried under the weight of scandal, suffocated by madmen who’d been looting them for a century. Men like Carlo Moro were legion and they worked hard to retain power. They had even created their own Golem, a kind of jester, a Milanese industrialist, spawned by the P4 secret lodge, who had grown up in troubled times and who owed his great wealth to his mafia connections. The Golem had monopolized the media and, now, the pale windows of TV screens reflected his gargoyle of a face between adverts. Pandering to the population’s baser instincts, the man had brought Ancient Roman games into line with modern tastes and now, instead of Christians providing the entertainment, a collection of poor sods paraded their private lives before millions of spectators. In between bloody sparring matches, young ladies, who were half-naked and preferably blonde, strutted around and commented on these pitiful confessions in shocked, strident tones. No one had ever seen such a mind-numbing initiative. Watching Italian television was like abandoning all hope, the way Dante had before the gates of his Inferno.

  The Golem was like a Roman emperor: old Tiberius, for example. He possessed all the same attributes.

  And yet I was enjoying myself at the Villa Medici. Giovanna had put me in the pavilion of that runaway writer whose name was no longer spoken on pain of excommunication (St Peter’s was just a stone’s throw away, after all). The hack had left behind all his things, among them his books and an unfinished manuscript: The New Voyages of Sinbad, which described the famous sailor’s new adventures. It was a strange novel, in which Sinbad’s adventures were all carnal. To my utmost delight, the sailor kept moving on from one woman to the next, so I didn’t put down the book until I’d finished it. It felt odd to meet yourself in a novel, to see your double doing things in your place and behaving like a scoundrel. But wasn’t that what literature was for: to hold up a vulgar mirror to our lives? That’s why writers were hated by their contemporaries, and I’m talking about real writers here. For example, in Carthago we’re very proud to number some scholarly torturers among our ranks. We mustn’t mistake the pen for the red-hot iron, or the sacred fire for the Electric Fairy; or confuse bathing in the fountain of youth, which is so vital for art, with wallowing in a bathtub of sorrowful memories. I for one have never mixed them up. I know a few writers who advertise their own worth. They are well-liked, and people kiss their arses in Europe. They are our high priests of literature. Our policemen of prose. Our incendiary cardinals. Our inquisitors. Those quill-pushers are celebrated throughout the world for their warlike exploits and their literary triviality. Something is rotten in the literary kingdom of Carthago. Let’s move swiftly on. I’ve never liked the scum who sit scribbling in their rooms and call that travelling. I’m the priest of open spaces, I’m the cloud with its trousers on fire. Live fast, go to the ends of the earth, love to the utmost: that’s my manifesto.

  So I felt a little cooped up in that magnificent mansion. I was pining for my darling Vitalia. And yet, the Villa Medici was divided into two separate, and totally different, areas. Your idea of self dictated where you lived. The residents called the group of houses at the far end of the Villa Medici’s grounds Sarcelles; while the rest, the delightful studios or studioli, were named Neuilly, showing the wicked sense of irony that prevailed in this place, given that the real Sarcelles is a poverty-stricken suburb of Paris. I loved this part of the garden; I loved the absence of luxury and ostentation in those graceless houses which were clearly a late addition. Anyway, our Sarcelles was not really Sarcelles, because you only had to push open a gate to find yourself in Via Veneto or at Porta Pinciana, which is one of the wealthiest districts in Rome, where whores still hang around the streets as they did in the time of Tennessee Williams.

  In 1948, Tennessee Williams discovered Rome. The youthful playwright, whose A Streetcar Named Desire had just been a massive success, walked along the Via Veneto in search of young boys. He disappeared down the paths of the Villa Borghese gardens. It makes me smile to think that, some sixty years apart, we walked along the same side streets. I haven’t yet acquired as much of a taste for boys as him, so it’s probably better to play down this amusing coincidence.

  Anyway, everyone when in Rome has rushed down the Via Veneto, the famous avenue from La Dolce Vita, which was, and continues to be, the Romans’ Champs-Élysées. It would be hard to imagine an uglier avenue, but it seems to have appealed to our playwright desperate for sensual experience:

  “As for prostitution, that is really the world’s oldest profession in all Mediterranean countries with the possible exception of Spain. It is due largely to their physical beauty and to their warmth of blood, their natural eroticism. In Rome you rarely see a young man who does not have a slight erection. Often they walk along the Veneto with hand in pocket, caressing their genitals quite unconsciously, and this regardless of whether or not they are hustling or cruising. They are raised without any of our puritanical reserves about sex.”

  The Romans don’t tend to play with themselves in the street nowadays. As for the prostitutes, I’ve glimpsed a few around the Villa in the evening, waiting for clients.

  “THE RIGHT WAY to travel is not knowing anyone in the places you’re visiting, or hardly anyone; you should not have any letters of recommendation to hand over, or any meetings to keep; you should have no appointments with anyone but yourself, so that you can see the things—in a region, in a town—that you wanted to see at your leisure, although, speaking purely for myself, there are usually not many. Of course, meeting people can also reveal a great deal about what we generally call the spirit of a place; but that is not so much in evidence as before and it is better, in any case, to admire this spirit in things instead. Thirty years ago, I travelled with a great deal of freedom and a great deal of pleasure; now, my endless meetings and commitments mean that I travel with very little freedom, and not so much pleasure.

  “The list of things I want to see, prepared before my departure or imagined for so long, always ends up being cut outrageously short or drastically changed by my obligations, which always seem to multiply unexpectedly. This is already happening during my short stay in Madrid. Fortunately, I’ve been here before.”

  Leonardo Sciascia vindicated my solitude. I read his Spanish Moments, shut away in my room: a vast chamber with a mezzanine and a coffered ceiling which was almost twenty feet high. I kept the room dimly lit to make reading easier.

  Outside, Rome is baking at the beginning of May, or June, or July. I have no idea which month it is. Only my reading keeps me here at the Villa Medici, and the weather doesn’t matter. I remain alone in my room, devouring books.

  I go out at nightfall when the heat is less unbearable, the light not so harsh and the streets not so crowded.

  Then I explore the darkened, dazzling alleys of the town. A strange bluish, peaceful light engulfs the ochre stone. I walk alone across the Corso, along the Piazza Colonna, and turn into the Piazza della Rotonda.

  The first time, in broad daylight, it was like a vision.

  The building had ripped through the web of time: the spacecraft, sent by an extra-terrestrial civilization, had landed on the town,
tearing open the houses and narrow streets. It was the loveliest ancient ruin I’d ever been lucky enough to see, as well as the most frightening. It was a dark mouth beneath the sky and I thought it had a barbaric beauty. It exuded a feeling of sacredness; but not a scalloped baroque sacredness which was timeworn and harmless. Not a bit of it. This witness to a most violent past flattened the surrounding district the way a rampaging elephant crushes the soldiers at its feet. The tragic monument of the Pantheon spewed out the blood of holocausts.

  Opposite, on the Piazza della Rotonda, the fountain by Giacomo Della Porta stands tall at the centre of its basin. The light pulses in the electric water and climbs up to attack the grotesque waterspouts. Under the grimacing gods, the corners are teeming with cockroaches. They are a brilliant glossy black. For a moment I think with delight of the tourists dipping their hands into the water to cool themselves. These creatures aren’t out of keeping with this place. They are well suited to the Pantheon as rebuilt by Hadrian. They nest in the folds of the malevolent mind who presided over the reconstruction of this place of worship. The Christians, then the Muslims, were kind-hearted in comparison; no one ever smelled the blood of sacrifices within a church or the courtyard of a mosque. It’s much better like this, thinks the modern fool: ancient practices like being mauled to death by wild animals or dispatched by a priest’s sword in front of the Pantheon are a thing of the past, but what was banished from the ancient temple now roams the streets. They burn down the houses and the people who live in them; they mow down the world’s children and women by bombing the towns: they no longer hold sacrifices, of course, but they reduce men to dust and ashes instead. It’s cleaner, more dispassionate, less visible.

  Beside the murmuring basin, where the black armies crawled, I remembered the epic of Hannibal.

  Carthago had seized control of all Phoenician trading posts in the West as a means of opposing Greek colonization.

  Carthago…

  Picture a city in the sea, linked to the African continent by a spit of land. A cove wound about by ships.

  A stroll through Cadiz is enough to give you an idea of that city engulfed by history.

  A former Carthaginian trading post, Cadiz, the Gades of Hamilcar Barca, Hannibal’s father, is still similar in spirit to its African cousin. This town stretches out into the sea and is linked to the mainland by a peninsula, as I was to see for myself one day when I had visited both cities.

  After a terrible, deeply upsetting visit to Granada, I stayed in Cadiz for several weeks, not without making a detour to Seville, where the Alcazar gardens and the cherry trees in bloom look so beautiful in the shifting light of March, at the very start of spring: the town is covered in a jasmine-scented cloud, and the streets around the Giralda, the old Moorish quarter, the Juderia, the Jewish ghetto, and the magical patios silently unfold in the sunshine, like penitents in a procession during the semana santa…

  It was at Megara, a suburb of Carthage, in the gardens of the Alcazar…

  I loved Salammbô, the book that set me dreaming during my adolescence in Carthago. I’d discovered it in a bookshop beneath a pile of books. The shop-soiled copy didn’t look like a good read for a young man who was still lured by garish illustrations and eye-catching images, none of which adorned its cover. It took me quite a while to read the first sentence of the novel, reluctantly, as if already bored in advance.

  It was at Megara, a suburb of Carthage, in the gardens of Hamilcar.

  Strolling along the ramparts of Cadiz is enough to plunge visitors into the dream of a city destroyed by the fury of men. Reading Salammbô is enough to make anyone fall under the spell of an Orient that shared very little in common with my own private Carthago. It shimmered with an unfamiliar light. It contained profound rapture, frightening destruction. I became a Carthaginian, a Greek merchant, a sacred whore who kissed a serpent and loved it like a man or woman, or something even stranger: I very soon became convinced that love is a mystery worshipped by the ancient religions. I began to seek out women’s favours even more fervently, in the anticipation that I’d discover hidden treasure there, a promise of infinite knowledge and pleasure.

  V

  IWAS MISSING VITALIA, and this brought on a somewhat melancholy mood which made me view Rome in a jaundiced light. I kept looking for her in the streets of the Eternal City. I rushed down the Via Veneto thinking of her sweet face. I visited the Barberini Museum and came to a halt, almost floating on air, before La Fornarina by Raphael, the Renaissance painter whom I revered as much as Giotto and Fra Angelico.

  La Fornarina deserves to be better known than the Mona Lisa. The bakeress was the painter’s mistress, who allegedly loved him to death. I had almost suffered the same fate between Vitalia’s arms and thighs. She dealt with me the way a laundress beats her washing, then thoroughly wrings it dry.

  Vitalia, La Fornarina, both brunettes with haunting eyes. A finger rests on the breast of one woman, whose large open eyes declare their desire for the visitor or casual lover. I understood Raphael: I fell in love with the woman in the painting. I continually mistook her for my one true Vitalia, my amazing magic lamp. All I had to do was rub her and she let out a demon. That lascivious genie granted all my wishes; he fulfilled my wildest desires, and my desires were endless, as were those of the Vatican’s painter when he brought his French stick to the oven or gave it to the young brunette with shining eyes so that she could knead it with hands as dainty as a Madonna’s, her small, round breasts like little brioches.

  I explored Vitalia’s body like a cartographer mapping an unknown land, constantly measuring the distances covered, drawing up increasingly detailed reports.

  I knew every promontory, every valley and every hill in this realm of pleasures and exotic fragrances. She rarely wore perfume and never wore make-up, except for lining her lashes with kohl, which made her dark gazelle eyes seem even larger. She oozed a delicate, heavy liquor. Her skin smelled of jasmine in the morning and amber at night. Her parted thighs opened into a welcoming darkness redolent of the lingering scent of damp grass.

  With my probing nose between her buttocks, I again sailed across the sea buffeted by storms and tempests, I burned under the throbbing sun, my lungs filled with sea spray and iodine, my eyes with flashes of frozen electricity. When I penetrated her, I became a ship with a conquering stern, a proud prow parting the foam. The sea beneath my body moaned and writhed, withdrew and pulled me close, then moaned again, as tireless as the tide.

  Such ecstasy could have sent me to the grave too, if the hateful Carlo Moro had not put an end to our love which, with the help of absence, now acquired a mystical edge. The lack of Vitalia, of her body driven wild with desire and burning hot as lava, created a love as infinite as the sky.

  Walking through the gardens of the Villa Borghese, I saw her behind every tree, every copse, as if this were some enchantment described by Ovid, in which the plants and flowers were captive girls transformed by a god or jealous goddess as a punishment: she was both the girl laughing as she kissed her fiancé and the old lady out walking with her granddaughter; she was the gently trodden grass, the dirt track in the rain, the October air inhaled as my stay in Rome was drawing to a close. Vitalia filled me with sap like spring, dried me out like August, and drained my strength like a languid autumn. I became the leaf in the wind that falls uncaring from a loveless tree.

  It was as I was walking along the Corso, lost in my memories, that I heard a shout:

  “Sinbad! Sinbad! My friend!”

  I turned and saw a man crouching in front of a church, clapping his hands to attract my attention. He was tall and black.

  “Robinson! What are you doing here?”

  Robinson had a pavement shop. He was selling posters of Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Janis Joplin and Mussolini. In Rome, you could obtain images of Il Duce quite freely. You have to remember that Rome was an open-minded city; a city where the Guide’s granddaughter was pursuing an honourable career in politics by invoking her illustrious g
randfather’s name.

  “Robinson, what are you doing selling that…”

  I pointed to the dictator’s blunt chin.

  “My dear Sinbad, I have to make a living. The Romans love their history. They’re proud of it… Not like we Africans.”

  “Still, Robinson, not him…”

  “I’ve got some portraits of Bokassa, but no one knows who he is here. We only have small-time tyrants. Who’s heard of Boumediene, for example?”

  “No one, you’re right.”

  “Those crooks aren’t capable of hassling anyone other than their own people. Total losers.”

  “But, all the same, you are black and that bastard didn’t like darkies!”

  “No one likes anyone,” said Robinson, as though stating an eternal truth. “Except you, dear Sinbad. You’re a good man, and an innocent one. A noble man, as we say in Senegal. You ought to hate me. My grandfather was in the Senegalese infantry corps. He must have killed some of your lot during the events in Sétif and Guelma in 1945.”

  “No one remembers the eighth of May.”

  “I remember everything, Sinbad. And I know that Lazio’s supporters love Mussolini and let me work in peace when they see I respect their great man. They don’t hunt me like a dog through the streets of the Città.”

  I was struck dumb by this notion of the survival of the weakest. The Senegalese was making good sense, no doubt about it.

  “Before you go, Sinbad, take this.”

  Robinson held out an amulet.