Flights

MANO DI CONSTANTINO

The first thing that caught my eye upon arriving in the Eternal City was the beautiful black salesmen of handbags and wallets. I bought a little red coin purse, because my last one had been stolen in Stockholm. The second thing was the stalls laden with postcards – as a matter of fact you could leave it at that, spending the rest of your time in the shade on the banks of the Tiber, perhaps having a glass of wine later on in one of the expensive little cafés. Postcards of landscapes, panoramas of old ruins, postcards ambitiously prepared so as to show as much as possible on that flat space, are slowly being replaced by photographs focusing on details. This is no doubt a good idea, because they relieve tired minds. There is too much world, so it’s better to concentrate on particulars, rather than the whole.

Here is a nice detail of a fountain, a little kitten sitting on a Roman ledge, the genitalia of Michelangelo’s David, a stone sculpture’s gigantic foot, a mutilated torso that instantly makes you wonder what face belonged to that body. An individual window on a wall the colour of ochre, and finally – yes – just a hand with its index finger raised up into the sky, monstrous, detached from some incredible whole just here, at the wrist – the hand of the Emperor Constantine.

I was infected by that postcard. You really have to be careful about what you look at when you’re first starting out! From that point forward I saw hands pointing something out everywhere; I became a slave to that detail, which possessed me.

The half-naked statue of a warrior, just in a parade helmet and with a pike in one hand; the other pointing out something up above. Two putti with greasy fingers directing others’ attention to the fact that there, above their heads – but what? And more, two women tourists bent over with laughter, their fingers, a group of people in front of an elegant hotel – because Richard Gere and Nicole Kidman had just come out of it – and on St Peter’s Square you could see hundreds of those pointing fingers.

At the Campo di Fiori I saw a woman petrified by the heat next to a tap with water, her finger up against her ear, as though she wanted to remember a melody from her youth and was just beginning to hear the first notes of it.

And then I noticed an old, sick man in a wheelchair being pushed by two girls. The old man was paralyzed, sticking out of his nose were two little transparent plastic tubes that disappeared into a black backpack. An expression of absolute terror was frozen on his face, and his right hand, with a predatory gnarled finger, was pointing at something that must have been just over his left shoulder.