Best European Fiction 2011

by Aleksandar Hemon

  That was my lecture once the girls had fallen asleep on the train, while Ralf peeled his oranges and divided them into thirds. I also said that I was well aware of the dubiousness of such generalizations, that they probably revealed more of my own ignorance than any real knowledge, and yet also represented my best attempt to get my bearings in the place.

  Of course other cities are louder, more fragrant, more foul smelling, narrower, faster, wider, more unpredictable—Calcutta, Sanaa, Cairo, Tokyo. I either love or hate them, but they remain foreign cities. Naples, however, is the black sheep in the family who is more annoying than some lunatic at the train station, or a gorgeous aunt or niece who sets your head spinning faster than any pin-up girl.

  Apparently there were no strikes in Naples, or at least no visible signs of such caught our eye. At least there were enough taxis. We took our luggage to the hotel, rode back into the city, met up with the rest of the group from the Villa Massimo—who arrived late because truckers had blocked the highway with their rigs—in the Pizzeria del Presidente, and then headed up to the National Museum. Just to describe our walk through the narrow streets—the rich dark colors of the façades, the lights strung for Advent, the mild air, the bright streaks of sky between roof gutters, the clotheslines, the gulls and pigeons you might have taken for handkerchiefs that the wind had ripped free and set spinning into the sunless blue—a real description of that walk would require far more time and space, and still not come close to capturing the happiness I felt with every step I took, a happiness that seemed as unfounded as it was perfectly natural.

  Once inside the National Museum we stood for a long time gazing at the Farnese Bull. Paula wanted a story to go with each work of art. We puzzled over the Alexander Mosaic, wondering who the man behind the mounted Alexander might be, and felt sorry for the soldier left to lie in the dust while the fleeing Persian king’s chariots rolled over him. Ralf carried Anna piggyback almost the entire time.

  I was in a hurry to get upstairs to see the Tadema exhibition. The few paintings by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema that I was familiar with had always left me more amused than anything else. As a master of his craft he was without parallel. Every detail, every shifting shadow across polished marble, every ornament of a robe draping the knee of a seated figure, was perfection. A pile of Tadema’s pomegranates is so three-dimensional you think they may fall out of the painting. And yet I found him infinitely boring. And not just because the faces of his idealized figures all look alike. I saw his paintings as the epitome of a zeitgeist—the various academies of the late nineteenth century had fought tooth and nail to win Tadema’s membership—that found his glistening sidetracked processions a cause for celebration. I find it an interesting phenomenon that in the era of photography someone held fast to a version of veduta painting and populated his canvases with his own salon guests—who had probably arrived by train—clad in classical garb. In the case of a man who was born in 1836 and died in 1912 one might plead mitigating circumstances for this attempt to flee the ever-accelerating world of modernity into one of ostensibly eternal classicism. And yet: Weren’t such paintings already an anachronism by the date of Tadema’s birth? Or had I missed something? I wanted to find out from his paintings.

  Arriving on the second floor the first thing I saw was Vesuvius. Staring at it from the same room where the model of Pompeii is displayed, you realize what others may smile at as a commonplace: Without Vesuvius there would be no Pompeii, no Herculaneum, but then also no mosaics and no Alexander Mosaic; this museum wouldn’t exist either, and even a Tadema would have painted differently.

  No wonder then that we also think of Vesuvius as a museum piece. Distance and the museum’s higher elevation might save us from the lava. But death from the air was a possibility too. Herculaneum had been buried by billowing small chunks of lava and a rain of ash, while toxic gases, which are said to make excavation risky even today, did the rest. The wind would only need to be from the wrong direction, and a new eruption would claim far more lives than the one of two thousand years ago.

  “Actually,” Tanya said, “people shouldn’t be let into the city without a reserved seat on the evacuation train.”

  That might have served as a good lead-in for my article: “Tadema—Under the Volcano.” But the exhibition was closed. At first we didn’t understand and assumed the cord dividing the hall—one half of which was devoted to various painters of vedute set in antiquity and the other half to Tadema—was a precautionary measure to protect the paintings. Once we realized our mistake, we presented our tickets for the special exhibition. But the uniformed women and men sitting beside the barrier turned away from us. “Chiuso, chiuso!” cried the one seated closest, and without so much as a glance at our tickets.

  “I’ve paid,” I said, “and now I want to see the other side of the hall.” They were silent. “I’m going to write about it, it’s really in your own interest.” No response. Only when I reached out to remove the cord did those ladies and gentlemen spring to life. One signore grabbed me by the arm. He was trying hard to keep his voice down. Tanya translated. Unemployed workers had barricaded themselves on the balcony up ahead, where they had unrolled their banners. No one knew how they would react if anyone got too close. The police had been notified, we would have to wait. “How long?” I asked. “Just a few hours,” came the answer, then he let go of me.

  I didn’t know what to do. The uniformed guards realized at once that I had capitulated and returned to their seats. “Then I can’t write about it,” I said. “So you’re free to go,” Tanya said.

  For my reading that evening we entered a side street off the Piazza San Domenico Maggiore and then descended a set of stairs into an artist’s studio. Camilla Miglio, a professor at L’Orientale, introduced me. The audience consisted almost exclusively of female students, most of them barely over twenty. I kept staring up at the window that looked onto the piazza. Last year, we were told, when Terézia Mora had given a reading here, they’d come close to having to shut down because of the sirens and shouts and the blue lights of police cars. The son of a Mafia boss had been shot dead very nearby.

  On our return to the hotel we were greeted with a shock. The girls were sleeping and Ralf lay stretched diagonally across our bed, an empty bottle of red wine with its cork replaced was on the little table by the window, plus a saucer full of cigarette butts, and beside it a stack of orange peels. It took Ralf a while to come around. At first he didn’t understand why we were whispering.

  According to him he had been drinking again for a good while, but in moderation, only in moderation, he said, no harm in that. That was beside the point, Tanya said, whether in moderation or not, and a whole bottle isn’t really “moderation” in any case. Why was he drinking in secret, I asked. But he wasn’t being secretive about it. He hadn’t drunk anything in our company, I replied. “You two don’t drink,” Ralf said. “On your account,” I said.

  I found his red-wine breath insufferable. I just wanted him out of the room quick.

  The next morning Ralf joined us at the breakfast table in a sunny mood. If we didn’t mind he’d like to accompany us to Pompeii.

  Tanya went on with her story about the dogs there and how they had chased my mother in the summer of 2001. At the exit from the ruins she had turned around without a second thought and opened a bottle of water she’d bought from a street vendor, then poured the water into the cup of her hand so that the dogs could drink. Ralf said that without the eruption Pompeii would be a totally insignificant town nowadays, worth a look at best because of an old church with walls decked out in provincial baroque, a phrase taken verbatim from his guidebook.

  The girls were bored by Pompeii—except for the corpses in glass display cases. It occurred to me that this was a town first colonized by Greeks and that Greek had held on as the preferred language well into the first century BCE. But then former Roman legionnaires donated money to build an amphitheater, and bit by bit gladiator games replaced performances of tragedie
s. Although the Greeks were no less cruel in war than the Romans, I was overcome with a strange sadness by the realization of how everyday life can undergo such brutalization within a single lifespan. The reconstructed amphitheater was closed; bars now blocked the entrances through which those doomed to die had been forced inside. It stank. It seemed to me an eternal stench, as if the fear of death had lived on, had seeped into the stones as urine and shit.

  Vesuvius stood out clearly against the afternoon sky. What would we do if it suddenly erupted? I wondered if Ralf would lend us a hand as he had in the metro the day before? And what about us? Would we leave him behind wounded, just so we could save the girls and ourselves? And what would that moment be like, when—with the children in our arms—we understood that there was no escape? I thought about the scene in Kill Bill where Uma Thurman is buried alive. She turns on her flashlight and works her way out of the coffin and up through the soil. Even though I knew better, I couldn’t imagine our fate to be any different: We too would dig our way up and out, over and over again.

  We had crossed paths with several young Asian women a few times—our last encounter, just as dusk fell, was in the Villa dei Misteri. The mural was painted in perspective, but with the focal point shifted slightly off-center, lending it a feeling of modernity that provoked our speculation. What else would have been lost to us if this work of art had not adorned one of the few intact houses of a provincial backwater? One of the Asian girls entered the room, cast a glance at the mural, and vanished again. I couldn’t control myself. “There is nothing better than this,” I shouted in English and ran after her a few steps. Whether her vacation was short or long, she would not see art like this again. Look into the eyes of these women, I wanted to say, look at these gestures, the raised arms and the little basins in their hands? Doesn’t it seem as if this were only yesterday?

  The young Asian woman turned around in fright, hesitated briefly. I waved for her to come back, but she scampered away like a nymph fleeing Pan.

  Tanya said that it would be charming to go on a trip that left out all the major sights, as Roussel is said to have done, who let himself be driven everywhere, but never left the car, not even in Egypt, just pulled the window curtain back a bit. I said that I couldn’t see anything charming about that, really couldn’t. Ralf was evidently trying to decide which side to take. But suddenly, for no obvious reason, he spread his arms wide, traced circles with his hands, and began to dance in small steps across the stone floor in front of the barrier. With eyes closed, he slowly raised his arms, his fingers intertwined, his head nestled first against one bicep, then the other. Then he snapped his fingers and did a couple of spins, arms outstretched at his side and making snaky motions.

  His dance lasted no longer than thirty seconds. After a final tippety-tap with his feet, he opened his eyes again.

  “Where did you learn that?” Tanya asked.

  “At the beach,” he said, “last summer.”

  Not even the girls could talk Ralf into a repeat performance, but he promised to dance with them in our hotel room.

  Nothing came of that, however, because after we returned home, he said good-bye and took off to see something of the city.

  We planned to have dinner that evening at L’Oca, where we were to meet Valentina and Carmen, who had invited us twice now to visit them in Naples. Valentina said that three men had been shot dead the evening before, halfway between the studio and the Cappella Sansevero, not a hundred meters from where I had read.

  The next morning we packed our things and rode with Ralf to Raimondo’s bookstore, Dante & Descartes, where we could leave our baggage until time for our train. I briefly considered trying the museum again for the Tadema show, but this was to be the girls’ day. And they wanted to see manger figurines and visit the aquarium.

  The Via S. Gregorio Armeno has row upon row of shops, every single one with nothing but crèche figurines. As I said, it was Ralf who gave us the angel as a gift. What he probably would have liked best was for us to buy another angel too, so we’d have one for each girl. Anna and Paula were each allowed to pick out a statuette, but both chose a shepherd with a lamb over his shoulders. Ralf bore the big green box ahead of us on the walk back to the bookstore.

  Raimondo had made coffee, and for the adults there was baba. The children got cocoa and cookies and the inevitable oranges.

  Ralf had stepped outside to smoke. I told Raimondo about our failed attempt to see the Tadema exhibition and said that it was in fact true what the guidebook said: that in Naples everything is put to immediate use, it all happens in the now. Not even the museum, I said, is a place for the past, because there too the present triumphed in the form of a protest by the unemployed, just as Vesuvius would likewise triumph again someday. My final words were mixed with a shout in the street. I heard it but paid no attention. In Naples someone is always shouting, and no one was to be seen at the door that opened onto the Via Mezzocannone.

  Later we tried to reconstruct what we had actually heard. We had all definitely heard “Stop!” but we couldn’t even agree on the name. “Felice,” is what I thought I’d made out, but neither Tanya nor Raimondo could recall that.

  Tanya was the first to react. “That’s Ralf shouting,” she said, “it’s Ralf.” She said it very coolly, as if she didn’t want to upset anyone. We got up and went outside.

  Ralf came running up the street toward us, waving and shouting that name, Felice, or at least that’s what I think. He had seen her in a car with three other women, he had recognized her. “And they didn’t have any clothes on,” he cried. A car was heading down the street, its brake lights flashed, a silver-colored car—middle-sized, nothing special. Ralf hailed a taxi, which drove on to the taxi stand at the upper end of the street, maneuvered back and forth to turn around, and came back down. “Call the police,” Ralf said, leapt into the taxi, and slammed the door. We could see him leaning over the front seat, gesticulating. The silver car turned left.

  “We have to call the police,” Tanya said.

  “And what are you going to tell them?”

  “That there was a car with naked women sitting inside.”

  I called Ralf’s cell-phone number. I got his voice mail. I tried again, until we realized that there was a ring coming from his shoulder bag, which he had stored behind the counter. In it were—in addition to two oranges—his wallet, toothbrush and toothpaste, and his guidebook. We waited for the carabinieri above the bookstore in a room painted green. All we could do was provide them with Ralf’s description—that, and what he had shouted. Tanya said that it was evidently one or several of the prostitutes he had made friends with last summer, at the beach south of Ostia. Had he been a client, the carabinieri asked. “Probably,” she said.

  The short carabiniere was pokerfaced; the tall one stared at me as if I was the offender. They took down Ralf’s cell-phone number. Tanya reviewed Ralf’s recent calls, but it looked as if he had made none since December 6th, the day he arrived in Italy. He had received only a few SMS messages from Vodafone promising “low-rate travel calls.” I didn’t find any Italian area codes in his stored numbers—except for ours. Toward the end I gave the carabinieri our address at the Villa Massimo and was in turn given a number to call as soon as Ralf got in touch with us again.

  When Raimondo offered to cancel our visit to the aquarium, we both rejected the idea almost in the same breath. Nothing in the world seemed more worth the effort than to head off to the aquarium with Tanya and the girls.

  During the short taxi ride I caught myself constantly staring into other cars. But why would pimps want to smuggle naked women through the city in broad daylight? The carabinieri had asked no questions along those lines, whatever that meant. We had to drive back through the long tunnel, since the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn—its official name—lies on the far side of the mountain, in a little park.

  There was an unpleasant fishy odor at the ticket counter. But that didn’t bother me, on the contrary, anything th
at put distance between Ralf and us made me happy.

  Christiane Groeben, the Stazione’s archivist, who has lived in Naples for over thirty years, led us upstairs to the hall with the frescoes by Hans von Marées. For the girls the attraction was the fish, but we wanted to give the frescoes a look. I tried as best I could to concentrate on her comments.

  The building had been erected over the course of eighteen months in 1872–73, right on the coast at the time. Today a wide coastal highway separates the Stazione from the sea. The frescoes were painted in the summer and autumn of 1873. They have been restored several times since then, most recently in the ’90s.

  Although the girls began romping about almost immediately and could barely be kept under control, eliciting the immediate and repeated apologies to our guide we felt were her due, for me the frescoes were both a discovery and a gift.

  I admired the tension Marées created merely by the placement of figures and how his faces are a blend of the individual and the abstract. Nothing is more alien to his work than the theatrical gesture, the narrative episode, or the snapshot effect of a Tadema, who was only one year his senior. The individual frescoes stand on their own, and enhance one another. They emerge in relationships, each to each, but without telling a story. And of course I was also amazed by the concept behind the enterprise. The interplay of art and science—the room balances the large laboratory on the opposite side of the building and was originally conceived as a concert hall, which soon became a library—was augmented to a triad by the addition of the aquarium. It was intended both as a way to offset costs and popularize scientific knowledge.