by Salim Bachi
“It will bring you luck. You’ll see her again, don’t worry. She’s waiting for you.”
“I’ll see who again?”
“Vitalia, Sinbad, Vitalia!”
I DIDN’T GET MUCH SLEEP the night after I’d bumped into Robinson. My back was aching when I got up. As I didn’t fancy breakfasting with the residents at the Villa, I went for a stroll in the direction of the Piazza del Popolo. I set out along the Via del Babuino as far as the vast round, or oval, square with its twin churches. Behind me was the steep climb towards the Pincio and the gardens where young couples fool around in broad daylight. I thought about Vitalia, and a little about Robinson crouching behind his posters, his African trinkets, and his Lazio supporters.
In front of me, beyond the square, was the deeply embanked Tiber, inaudible and invisible. I sat on the stairs leading down to the riverside. Mingled scents of flowers and urine. The riverbanks were deserted. The river flowed past, majestic, emerald green, alone, like a long prison sentence under the sky. People don’t tend to stroll by the Tiber the way they walk beside the Seine. The Romans are wary of their river. Not that long ago, it had been infested with mosquitoes, malaria-carriers.
I was still reading Spanish Moments, far from the city’s noise, on the steps down to the embankment. It was pleasant in the shade, the warm air filling my shirt, blowing gently through the trees. I listened to the rustling of the leaves. A father and his two children sat down beside me, even though the Tiber was deserted for several hundred yards. A man can never be alone, especially if he’s comfortable somewhere.
I stood up, walked back across the Piazza del Popolo and climbed the steps up to the Pincio. The walk to the Villa Medici is one of the most beautiful in Rome. The road between the trees overlooked the town and its terraces. Under the garlands of wisteria, I felt a huge surge of renewed life. The scorching sun fell on me between the leaves and the burning patches on my skin flowed like clear water as time passed and the walk seemed to last for ever.
There, between the carob trees, on the road to the Trinità dei Monti, I decided to visit Florence. Why Florence? I didn’t know. I had dreamt about the city of Dante and Brunelleschi since I was a child. I went back to my room, packed my case and ordered a taxi for Termini station. I waited a long time for the train, as is customary in Rome where nothing happens quickly. I was used to that. I’d spent years waiting when I was living in Carthago, the city of unfulfilled desires. Finally, the train came and, two hours later, I was walking through the streets of the stone city which was shrouded in mist. A beggar woman was imploring the pavement for help. It was growing dark. The Palazzo Vecchio was lit up. Pale lights. Cold lights. The beggar woman was dying on the frozen cobblestones of Florence. Another of those creatures from Albania, trafficked by mercenaries who had then abandoned her to her fate.
As the statues looked on: Perseus holding Medusa’s head at arm’s length; David with drawn sword, his eyes rebellious beneath an elegant headdress.
The impassive gaze of the gods.
Hotel Alighieri.
I climbed the rickety staircase up to my room. I emptied my pockets onto the bed. Not much there. No money. No honey. I’d have to go out begging. I was an ancient god. Was I going to lose my sight? Be led by my daughter from place to place to recount the woes of the man greedy for knowledge who murdered his father and slept with his mother? There are times when I was afraid of failing, like the poor beggar woman who looked so much like me she could have been my sister. Shipwrecked creatures held a mirror up to my life, reflecting my destiny like the fate of the Porter from the legend that saw me born into another story, among the pages of an old manuscript found in a Cairo market at the end of the nineteenth century, and translated by strange adventurers who knew Arabic and haggled over the treasures of the Orient.
Did anyone still know what the Arabian Nights was? People didn’t read any more. They watched the Golem’s television, which now reached across the whole wide world, while cargoes of slaves died: the poor sods drowned at sea or perished by the executioner’s machete while the West had fun. But I didn’t feel any hatred. I walked quietly and sensibly through the city of rebirth, where Giotto had executed his first shaft of light.
The cobblestones were shining like worms.
I could still see.
Phew.
A bar.
Men and women lounging on long ottomans. Lounging in the smoke. In a room filled with long, smoky ottomans. Men. And women. In the late-night heat of this enclosed place.
Inferno!
“Virgilio! Virgilio! Per cortesia, una birra!”
Virgilio pulled a beer.
The whisper of the lager.
“The same, please.”
Virgilio doesn’t understand.
Damned language!
An enquiring glance from Virgilio.
“Virgilio! Una birra!”
A young woman has just spoken to the barman. He put a beer mug in front of me. I glanced at my good Samaritan. She nodded to me. I nodded back and moved closer to her.
“You speak…”
“Stendhal is my favourite author.”
He was mine too. Or that’s what I said.
“Virgilio, that’s an odd name.”
“It’s very old. My name is Beatrice.”
I apologized that I couldn’t buy her a drink. As Rimbaud said, I’d gone off with my hands in my coat pockets and my overcoat was becoming ideal. Giovanna hadn’t had time to give me any money. I’d run off without seeing her; I didn’t want to be saddled with questions, promises or tears.
Beatrice allowed me to walk back with her. We left Virgilio’s cave, just a few yards from the Santa Croce church where Michelangelo lies until Judgement Day. His tomb, near the entrance, faced the Duomo, the first treasure that the sculptor wanted to see when he rose with the dead on the Day of Resurrection.
Outside, a cool mist hung above the cobblestones. Beatrice light-heartedly talked about Stendhal, literature and Renaissance Florence. She followed me back to my hotel room. I sensed that she would have followed me to the ends of the earth if I’d wanted, but I didn’t put it to the test, in case she formed too strong an attachment. I refused to live beyond my means, while my mind wandered through the maze of narrow cobbled streets, between the mansions whose thick façades prevented me from appreciating the true charm of exquisite chambers where bronze boys frolicked, a catapult hanging from their fine-boned hands. Beatrice, like every other proud and poetic Laura, required her lovers to provide a wealth of poetry that I no longer possessed. My lost boyhood in Carthago, that vile town, had denied me most of the delights found only in a carefree childhood. I’d experienced war and its horrors. My own body had felt the impact of an explosion which destroyed my town and spread desolation along its shores.
Beatrice was also a child, but without the excuse of youth like Vitalia, whom I rediscovered in Beatrice’s body, although the latter was blonde, and smelled of fire and iron while Vitalia wore the fragrance of dawning summer. I felt just as happy loving her, though. I lost myself in the same way between her legs, which were as long as the Arno snaking its way through Tuscany. When she straddled my stomach, she was like the Ponte Vecchio over the river bed.
Her bellybutton and her breasts, like treasures unfolding before the eyes of an idle stroller, formed a picture or fresco similar to those adorning the walls of convents and churches, which eternalized the glory of the city where I liked to lose myself. Beatrice had Beauty’s throat of marble, which bruised and chilled her lover’s mouth. Perplexed by so much violence, splattered with gold, I burned in my turn like the lamp in the Qur’an, that sacred flame whose light illuminated the world. Beneath my mistress’s ardent body, flooded by her desire, made fertile by the ebb and flow of silt-laden waters, I was consumed like the olive wood in the Qur’an, in Beatrice’s flesh, a poem become river.
BEATRICE WAS TWELVE when she experienced love for the first time. The man was a poète maudit whose every endeavour ended
in failure. All that he had to show for himself were his new poems and a short, pointless life which, for all that, was to influence generations of men to come. What was his name? Beatrice refused to tell me. Perhaps he was dead, and his face was fading from collective memory after being captured by one of those painters who were to make Florence famous. He had been born too late: Giotto had already departed this world.
I didn’t give a damn about Dante; I travelled inside Beatrice like a pilgrim bracing himself on his staff. I slipped inside her like a trout or a blessed fish, rubbing my scales over her smooth skin, insinuating myself like the serpent in the lovers’ Eden. We were the whole world, I was the eternal Adam and she was the primordial Eve. I kissed her Madonna’s hands the way I’d once kissed the face of La Donna Velata, Raphael’s lascivious lover, arrayed like a saint, which made her even more desirable. But is loving convent virgins the only way to experience this sweet turmoil? Nothing is less certain, even if the modern alternative is not so appealing: loving only women the same age as you means turning your back on most kinds of love. Beatrice was ageless. She had sprung from those far-off centuries when all women looked like adolescents; when all the prostitutes in Florence inspired an imprudent Lippi or an austere Botticelli.
On the occasions that I recalled Florence, it was Beatrice’s face I saw, the woman’s face, instead of the city which took on finely nuanced colours as the days went by. The uneven, rectangular cobblestones regained their former sheen. The city woke forever under Beatrice’s inquisitive gaze, which was filled with surprise at the renewed wonder shown by a corsair at the prow of his galliot on a rising, rebellious tide. The city’s laughter filled my ears and merged with the lapping of the river that flowed past, telling us that Time made no difference because, although we might be breathing and walking now, sooner or later we’d have to give up our place and be swaddled in a shroud and cast into oblivion. The only things that remained eternally alive were La Donna Velata’s smile, in which our dreams entwined; Fra Angelico’s winged angels glimpsed fleetingly on the first floor of the San Marco Convent, intimate and hushed as a shell; or the crotch of a trollop burning with youthful passion and the play of light on her face as rendered by the greatest painters. Florence was like Ali Baba’s cave. An unpretentious-looking palace, holed up behind high walls, yet containing all the relics of the world, the hard work of artists who had died over five centuries ago; their souls lived on in the walls and the lanes near the Arno, through which you had to stoop, and where you could easily imagine that the shops and gloomy studios were caves in which the images of a civilization had been created. It was weird and wonderful to follow in the footsteps of those guardians of memory. It was impossible to imagine a better quest. Verrocchio’s impish David continued on his way alongside Perseus who, still a boy, was brandishing a severed head.
As the days passed, my mood grew darker. My outings with Beatrice depressed me. The city’s charms began to pall. My thoughts returned to Vitalia, who kept coming back like rheumatic fever to the heart, a fatal condition afflicting me every morning on waking. I wished for her skin, soft as a peach, her breath like a jasmine flower intoxicated by the star over the Giralda. I shall remember those nights I spent in Seville until the end of time, long after I’ve forgotten my stay in Italy. I went there to cure an illness, when I was bone-tired, already mature and weary of so many adventures. I wasn’t just running away from the dramas of a man without family or friends, who travelled from port to port, carried along by desire, exiled from perpetual exile.
Beatrice noticed and didn’t put up a fight or try to hold me back. It wouldn’t have done any good. She let me disappear down the Arno, my thoughts in turmoil, sailing to my misfortune down all the rivers of the wide world.
In Carthago, many years later, it pleased me to think that the young lovers shed a few tears. As we all know, memories are our finest creations. I did remember the church of Santa Croce, though, where I had admired Giotto’s fresco of the death of St Francis of Assisi, surrounded by his disciples.
We were convinced that the soul didn’t exist. It was an invention of primitive peoples. Nevertheless, the figure of the saint was continually in my thoughts.
Every night, I found myself kneeling before the recumbent figure. I was one of the monks around his catafalque. And I was praying. I was dreaming, needless to say, but the dream was very real. I stretched my hand out towards the smooth, lifeless face of the saint. I wept, and then woke up.
Vitalia.
I learnt that the night had claimed its share of victims. Thousands of dead taken in huge trains to be cremated. Vast pillars of smoke stained the sky. We were now living under permanent greyness. Our golden age had come to an end. Carthago was burning. We were the legions, we were Rome, and Scipio’s dream went up in flames.
At night, I fell asleep, exhausted, and dreamt.
I’m lying against the cold wall of the chapel. Laid on a narrow catafalque. Monks are fingering my robe. Some are weeping. Others run their fingers lightly over my face. One of them has taken my hand in his. It is heavy, so heavy. Every surface of the world around me has entered an icy darkness.
VI
ON MY RETURN TO ROME, I read Sciascia in the dim light of my large room; it brought me some consolation for my fellow residents’ stupidity and the terrible boredom that had come over me.
“Whose dream am I?” I wondered when reading the lines of the great Sicilian prose writer. “Am I the dream of this villa perched on the Pincio? Or of all the travellers who have come before me in the world order?”
But Sciascia was dreaming of me, the Arab from the tale:
“In his dream, he is surrounded by sand, a Sahara of black sand. There is no water, there is no sea. He is in the middle of a desert—in the desert you are always in the middle—and he is obsessed with trying to find a way out, when he sees someone next to him. Oddly enough, it is an Arab of the Bedouin tribes, mounted on a camel and holding a lance in his right hand. Under his left arm he has a stone; in that hand he holds a shell.
“The Arab tells him that his mission is to save the arts and sciences, and then brings the shell to his ear; the shell is extraordinarily beautiful. Wordsworth tells us he listened to the prophecy (‘in an unknown tongue, which yet I understood’): a sort of impassioned ode prophesying that the earth was on the verge of being destroyed by a flood sent by the wrath of God. The Arab tells him that it is true, the flood is coming, but he has a mission: to save the arts and sciences. He shows him the stone and, oddly, it is Euclid’s Elements, while remaining a stone. Then he brings the shell closer and the shell too is a book; it is what has spoken those terrible things. The shell is, moreover, all the poetry of the world, including—why not?—the poem by Wordsworth. The Bedouin tells him: ‘I must save these two things, the stone and the shell, both of them books.’ He looks behind him, and there is a moment in which Wordsworth sees that the face of the Bedouin has changed, that it is full of horror. He too turns round and he sees a great light, which has flooded half the desert. This light is the light from the waters of the flood, which is about to submerge the earth. The Bedouin goes off and Wordsworth sees that he is also Don Quixote and that the camel is also Rosinante, and that in the same way as the stone was a book and the shell was a book, so the Bedouin is Don Quixote and is neither of the two and is both at once.
“Another thing to note in Wordsworth’s nightmare is the terror inspired by the great light flooding the desert, which is said to be the light of the water. We know now that it might be something else because, for us, the image of atomic destruction has become indistinguishable from the image of a universal flood. We should also note that the image of Don Quixote resolutely riding away recalls that particular painting by Daumier, perhaps of the exact same moment.”
Don Quixote leant over to tell me the adventures of my double, the other Sinbad, who lived more than a thousand years ago and whose journey continued in the memory of women storytellers; and I listened, just as fascinated as Si
nbad the Landsman, the Porter who long ago entered the home of my double by chance.
It was a strange encounter in Baghdad, an ironic twist of fate; two men of the same age, speaking the same language and bearing the same name, twins separated by their stations in life: one made wealthy by a life of adventure, the other poor as Job.
And I pictured myself too in Sinbad the Sailor’s luxurious house, surrounded by women slender as ephebes, free and sweet as flowers, wild as fawns. Exhausted by a day of hard labour carrying my load through the famous markets of Baghdad, which were the envy of the world, I finally rested in the dim light so conducive to storytelling, that dream liberated by words. As I was being presented with dishes of fine food—which I enjoyed greatly—my host told me of his strange life.
Baghdad was a mirage that had materialized in the desert, like those oases which split in two in the heat of the sands and encourage twice as many daydreams in the shade of palm trees by murmuring streams. It was a town impossible to loot, and yet it was looted, and so badly that virtually no trace of it remained except in the memory of its descendants who, to ensure they would never forget, spread wondrous stories which, unlike the town, would live on for ever. And so Sinbad would travel the seas for eternity, tethered to a painter’s canvas like Odysseus to his mast, his arms bound but his mind full of harmonies, depicted against a background blue as the sea at night, a captive on a crescent-shaped boat.
And Harun-al-Rashid, Commander of the Faithful, disguised himself as a beggar to spy on his subjects and learn of their hopes and disappointments. At night, he would slip like an alley cat into sleazy taverns where men drank wine with an unknown quantity of thieves, even though it was often said that there were in fact forty of them, and that they had fabulous riches hidden in a cave; this would open when they uttered simsim, a mysterious word like a cascade of silver coins that was to fire the imaginations of generations of children, captains of the night standing at the prow of a dream. The real caliph, dressed as a poor wretch, watched a huge illuminated boat floating past on the Tigris. They were honouring Caliph Harun-al-Rashid, a man who was passing himself off as him, the Commander of the Faithful. His double was living a life of gaudy splendour and luxury in Baghdad, as one might imagine, and, as might be expected of a great prince, was decked out in great finery like a woman, a forerunner of the usurpers who were to corrupt and ruin the beautiful city before it was laid waste to by the Mongolian armies.
