Rome Noir

Pasolini’s Shadow by Nicoletta Vallorani

Translated by Anne Milano Appel

Piazza dei Cinquecento

We all drift silently in a world of shadows.

The right night, a place I know. The station hunkers in the heart of this city.

Without a history.

We are all without a history, because we are overwhelmed by it. By the lack of reason, in a civil society that is breaking up, forgetting everything.

The Romans were builders of roads. I, who am a foreigner, travel them. I seek a familiarity that I will not find, I already know that, but it is enough for me to seek it: It is an uncodified move, a journey with eyes wide open. Rome is a body whose strong legs and dirty feet are known to me, hands quick to steal money from your pockets, hired sex, soft, dark hair, muscles that slither, breath that stinks of cigarette smoke and cheap liquor.

Roads. The houses like people: They have a worn, dusty nobility, in this Rome, that yields to time unsparingly. And time, silently, crumbles bricks, molds pavement, brushes bodies with the same gentle, profound caress that I would like to have or experience.

Roads. A troublesome object that I do not see on the asphalt, and the car jerks. A tire absorbs the jolt, smashing what lies beneath it and continuing on its way: maybe a small life has ended, perhaps only a shattered object. At the end of life, the two are equivalent.

Roads. Where I ran as a child there was dirt and grass. I splashed about up to my knees, happy. That time is gone.

Roads. The Romans were builders of roads, but that time is gone as well.

Piazza dei Cinquecento, legs spread, lies there waiting. The fools, those who can’t see, think they can rape her, possess her. But in this dark, nocturnal cavity they are lost, devoured, chewed up and spit out as small white bones. I, on the other hand, know. I know the secret, and will not get lost.

The station is a door: From there you go or return.

The station is a lady covered in rags, with garbage for jewels. She laughs, deceptively indulgent and defenseless, hiding the gnashing of her teeth behind the trains’ clatter. She whispers promises she will not keep, but she is always a mystery because men believe in lies and let themselves be lulled by them. Rome knows all secrets, protects all sins. It is a museum of sorrow and shame, where the executioner laughs at the victim whose head he is preparing to lop off, with no remorse whatsoever and with unbounded craving.

The little garden is a place of bones. It is a city of secrets, catacombs, buried memories replaced by artfully constructed recollections. But here, in the little bone garden, it is impossible to lie. There are places where the city reveals itself. It can do so because nobody really looks, no one sees anything except what he wants to see.

But I know.

I am aware of the fraud. I revealed the secret. Still, I am not a danger, since no one will believe me. Rome can do this: display the truth, make it her whore, and sell it to the highest bidder.

Ghosts crouch in the little bone garden.

We all drift along, silent, alone.

It’s like a breath I’m lacking, that I continue to look for, driving around aimlessly, with eyes that see in the dark, matching profiles and desires. Desire fulfilled is a simulated death. And like every death, it examines the meaning of life retrospectively, transforming it into myth. Desire is the articulation of a solitude from which I will not emerge, except at the instant of an embrace. A moment, a caress, a body that responds like an object, in the unreasoning workings of sensation.

I have a powerful, expensive car. I pull up, knowing I’ve been spotted.

In Piazza dei Cinquecento, I drive around the heart, mine, that of the city.

At the drink stand, there’s a fat, sweaty man. He is an actor made for the part, as if in the entire city, in all the stands of Rome, there were only variations of that same role, in male or female versions. Performing specters, full of life that I cannot think of as sentient, with open shirts, oil stains on their undershirts, hands gripping the glass, squeezing the life out of it before handing it to the customer. And the customer, a young man with heavy cigarette breath, his curls straightened to look more gorgeous and his beard pointlessly shaved to make him appear older, takes the glass without bothering to be polite. Rome is not polite. Rather, she is a slut, astute and well aware of her urges, who when caught with her hands in the till absolves herself by displaying her illustrious medals: Nero’s crown, the Colosseum’s stones, grass, cats, the Pope, political figures. They have all lied. All of them. Including the cats.

I have an expensive car, that is known here, which does not necessarily make me one of the family. I am the rich uncle: My eccentric manias are tolerated as long as I bring money. My gaze is not heavy. It skims, in order to procure what I need: targets with curly hair. Shoes with a wedge, to appear taller. Sweaters tight across the chest, in colors like small suns in the night. I wonder what life drifts through those heads. But it doesn’t matter to me. It really doesn’t matter to me. The thoughts are mine. The body I look for elsewhere.

The boys arrive, three of them, walking down the sidewalk from Via Volturno to Via Einaudi. They materialize out of partial darkness. Nights are never very dark in the city. There is always too much light to hide by, but not enough to see. I adjust my glasses, I turn the wheel, I am not thinking, I release a desire and a fantasy that proceed side by side, searching for someone.

The three boys arrive, but only one approaches, talks to me. A slight uncertainty, hesitation resulting from his young age. I am never afraid, I am not in a hurry, I do not have a primary need. This is a slow, philosophical city. It is not wise as some think, no. It wears a cloak of wisdom that has frayed over time but that still holds up, thanks to patching, and continues covering a king who will never be nude. We, or those who do not know better, will always see a jewel-covered brocade instead of a flabby, swollen, though still immortal body. The night envelops this body in a warm wakefulness, that inherits from the day an ancient lethargy: the mellow rhythm of one who has experienced magnificent times and conserves the memories, eyes closed. Thus the hesitation, the rejection, the slight wavering of the expression, the exaggeratedly seductive walk as he moves away — all fit in. The boys I love, I reflect, are the breath of this city.

It’s like a breath that I am lacking. As I said, I am a foreigner.

And yet I know that it is a common situation, one that is shared. This piazza is thronged with ghosts who do not belong. It is a city of the world, Rome is, lost in the idea of an empire that once was. We all continue to look for it. It is a treasure hunt, tonight’s hunt, and I can’t find the ticket that will get me to the next station. The last stop... I can’t even find a mate, a crew that will play with me.

The three boys are standing motionless in front of the drink stand. They’re speaking in low tones.

The fat guy inside doesn’t even look at them: You can only survive in these places by never really and truly being present.

One boy shoves another.

The third one laughs.

The curly headed one glances my way, turns serious, murmurs some more.

If I try to scan the syllables, I still can’t manage to understand what they’re saying. We adore conspiracies when we are young. Then we get old and we need proof, certainties, unclouded waters.

With the air of keeping a secret that he will not reveal, curly top advances boldly. He walks around the car and, without smiling, gets in.

I drive off swiftly. Via Cavour.

It unwinds like an artery through a body that is being drawn right now, before my eyes. The blood of the city throbs there, secretly. I try to grasp its rhythm as I listen to the words and breathing of the boy beside me. I breathe the scent of an aftershave that is cloying. I try to concentrate on what my momentary, hesitant companion is saying. I am unable to separate the sound from the dark throbbing of Rome’s blood, which becomes deafening, arrogant, and obstructive when Via Cavour flows liquidly into Via dei Fori Imperiali. The wound has eviscerated the city. A knife slash, deep, precise, that severed memory at the beginning of the twentieth century, suturing the past to the present. There were gradual steps before this operation. The Medieval period was lost. The Renaissance was lost. What remains to us are only the past and the present, with a void in between.

But you don’t know. You breathe beside me, ill at ease. You hide your uneasiness by dictating rules. You tell me what you want to do and what you don’t want to do. You repeat that you are not a femme. You say you want to be paid well. Your laugh is strained. You smile. Then you act like a tough guy. You tell me to watch out because you’re a tough guy. And you’re not a femme. It’s just for the money.

I say nothing. I listen to your breathing. I try to take possession of it. You have to understand: I don’t want to hurt you. It’s just that yours is a breath that I am lacking.

Empty.

The gaping mouths of the Colosseum are arresting desolation. I’ve always thought that it was the blood that made them noble. The death of others, especially if it is bloody, illuminates objects. The life that once was has left a spectral breath, captured in a thousand films. The gladiator, grown old, gropes in the dark, trying to stand up to the parameters of the battle. He has been there for a thousand years, waiting for an enemy, and all he sees, instead, is a swarm of lunatics equipped with cameras. He poses, flexes his muscles, yawns. In the beginning, he tried to tell people that none of it was true and that death in the arena was miserable and illegitimate, that a gladiator was brought there filthy and emaciated, that the savage beasts had no trouble devouring him, and that at times the gladiator almost failed to defend himself. His only desire was to die quickly, as soon as possible, and become a ghost. In the beginning, the gladiator-ghost wanted to unmask the lie, but later, like everyone else, he surrendered.

Now he roams around, gaunt, appearing in the dark cavities and passing through them silently. A cat tries to steal his mantle, but it’s a just playfulness. Cats can recognize ghosts. It is we men who have a hard time doing so.

You busy yourself with your sweater, beside me. You take it off, pumping up your muscles. Your tang invades the car and I accelerate. I smile. I am never completely captivated. I am never entirely able to let myself go. I nonetheless observe myself succumbing to desire.

You take off a shoe as well.

The dirty feet of Rome walk on roads a thousand years old. Dirty feet run on improvised little soccer fields, wear shoes that are too tight, clamber on loose heels, get injured, heal, are liberated. In the end, they are sheathed again. Dirty feet inside clean shoes, with a heel.

History flows along in confused rivulets. It’s an illusion that it is linear. We like to think so, to imagine a beginning and an end, because that way we can understand. History instead dupes us. It is a ball of yarn unraveled by a cat. I am the cat and I rush toward Via di San Gregorio with my prey in my teeth. I don’t bite down though: I don’t want to wound it. Only to allow myself, in the end, to become the victim. It is a subtle desire to imagine one’s own death and transform it into legend.

No one knows what’s in store for him. We try to imagine. But life is a master of fantasies. I am a disciple. As clever as I am, I will never be able to really understand.

At one time, chariots raced in the Circus Maximus. The echo of the shouting and applause remains in the air and is not erased. If you gather the dust, you feel how light it is and it slips through your fingers like the years that have gone by. But nothing has been erased. It is an illusion that the past disappears. Its strength lies in being transformed. Today’s gladiators confront one another in a different way, but the taste of dust and blood remains, in the mouth, as the only reliable trace of the battle.

In this city, the body of a kidnapped politician may be found.

In this city, young revolutionaries and young policemen have died and will die.

In this city, we have seen and will see different weapons taken up with the usual rage inside.

The taste of blood is not erased.

There is no past. It is all, in fact, in a perpetual present.

You don’t know.

That’s what I like: Your mind does not know, your body cannot know.

The taste of blood is not erased.

Viale Aventino is another artery on which I speed along, a subtle virus in the body of the city. Houses of fictitious nobility conceal the Lungotevere from me, to my right. I miss the water. I want to go fishing for memories in the river. If I could rob corpses of their memories, I would.

But there is no time, there is no time.

The water flows along, immutable. Rubbish has accumulated, making the flow heavy and sluggish, deceptively harmless. There are treasures at the bottom of the Tiber, which has cushioned blows and concealed sins. The river does not disguise itself. From the bridges, we see ourselves in the filthy water for what we are: aggregates of mongrel desires that we are ashamed to confess.

You, however, are not ashamed. There is a straightforward, simple artlessness in the awkward gestures with which you open the window and lean your elbow out. You watch me out of the corner of your eye, proud to be in control of the situation. You interpret my silence as acquiescence, and in fact it is. I am ready, my boy, to do anything to have you: You are certain of this. The defiance you show is a performance that I am gladly willing to humor. Under your skin, your tense muscles prevent fluid movements. You are a young puppet, resisting the strings that control him. But the strings are strong and the puppeteer shrewd and determined.

Is it me?

The puppeteer has no emotions. He is lucid and stern. He is not seeking memories but money. He has no desire for flesh. He does not love you and is not attracted by you. He is not prepared to caress you. He does not think of you as the body of this city. He does not drive around at night scouring Rome in a luxury car. He has no money to spend on you to make you happy. He does not want to make you happy. He does not want to feel your skin beneath his fingers. He is not speeding along Viale Aventino (or is he? Is there a car following us? Maybe.). The puppeteer is a stern, organized individual. He could never fall in love, even for a minute. He is the ideal executioner, because he believes in punishment as education. It’s his mission.

The puppeteer is the black heart of this city.

It’s not me.

I’m not pulling your strings.

Rather, it seems, you are pulling mine.

The body grows. The city expands beyond its confines. Toward its confines is where I’m bringing you.

Via Ostiense: It is an evening of great roads that lead where I want to go. The street dwellers slacken. We are few, we nocturnal travelers, closed within this private world of metal and glass, silent with our thoughts.

The houses become different, Rome removes her false dignity and exposes bits of skin. Smooth, dark, wounded, filthy, soft, young skin. The skin of a body chasing after a ball. The skin of a mouth screaming. The skin of a hand that grasps, caresses, strikes, pinches, scratches.

Skin.

The skin of Rome begins to be exposed.

That is what I want, madam: to expose you in order to reach your heart.

But you are hungry, and heart, yours or mine, matters little to you. You are hungry and restless. You look around, look behind you (is there a car following us? Maybe.).

I’m not concerned. Young boys are anxious and nervous. I’m not concerned. I never am.

The fact remains that you’re hungry.

I stop.

Eating is a rite. The food enters the body, intriguingly prepared. The gestures recall other sensualities. The eyes allow a pleasure to surface, this time permitted, that alludes to other less licit pleasures. And it is not the mind that does all this.

Your mind does not know that you are eating this food as if it were, for me, a preview of the moment when you will eat my body.

I am silent, watching you. The November night evokes ghosts, but it is quiet. The trattoria has no indiscreet eyes: a simulation of a broken family, where everyone hates everyone but doesn’t show it. Around us, time has passed, and in a more evident way than in the city. Even the darkness is more worn and tired. Poverty wearies everyone. Those who have always been rich don’t know it. But we know it well. In our veins, as in those of Rome, plebeian blood flows.

Hearts beat at close distances. In deeper silence, I try to measure your emotion, to feel the throbbing that drives the thin blood into your hands as they fret nervously. You chew, forgetting to close your mouth. A bit of food falls out.

Rome is layered with remains.

You pick up the bit of food and put it back in your mouth. Now it is you.

It is time to go. The city that never really ends pushes us out. I can’t resist the urge. I speed along in the car. I am the virus in this city’s blood. And you accompany me, without my having truly captured you.

Via Ostiense runs parallel to the river, and like the river, glides inexorably to the sea. I do not resist the current. I go where the water of desire leads me. Curiosity takes shape, side by side with your fear. I feel it, your fear, though I do not understand the reasons for it. I will not do you any harm. How could I?

Via Ostiense and its secret ways. Something leads me where we both want to go. Of this I am certain: We both want to get there.

The place is waiting for us.

The city can be seen from outside, mirrored in the garbage that it has pushed out.

The city appears unfinished and ongoing, in houses never completed but left waiting for better times. Brackish water has rusted what remains of old industries, looming shadows in the darkness that has deepened. It is a darkness that has teeth, this one: dangerous. It devours, leaving only stripped bones that shine in the sunlight. The skeletons of unfinished buildings are also bones, which someone will hasten to cover with the flesh of bricks, and then fill in the spaces with wretched lives.

I turn off the Lungotevere onto a lesser road, a small unknown blood vessel that you and I know. Fields and piles of refuse on both sides. Rummaging there, among the garbage, we learn many things we don’t know about the city. It is a necessary rite in order to understand. As disgusting as it is, it’s the refuse that tells us the most: What people don’t want is more significant than what they keep, because we are afraid of waste and hasten to get rid of it. Over time, the refuse grows and invades and expands and breeds and is transformed. Into what, I don’t yet know. But it interests me. It interests me to rummage through the scraps of these insignificant lives.

Through the small piazza, glimpsing the absence of movement. Exploits declaimed in small, out-of-the-way bars, the shabby trick of a con man who dupes people, wondering fruitlessly why they are here. The road I am following, that suddenly seems to turn back toward the heart of Rome, is also a rotten trick. And now it’s a fraud. That’s not where we’re going.

And the heart that interests us is another.

There are soccer fields, poor simulations separated from the road by only a net. They contain the echo of a thousand little matches, a ritual that fascinates me, in practice and in memory. It is a mythological ritual, that of the game: Playing on a mangy field amid piles of garbage, we all feel like champions, and we will earn lots of money, we will be applauded, we will marry a model and bring beautiful children into the world. It is a fairy tale, a bag-lady version of the noblest myths, and it helps us. That’s what fairy tales are for: to give meaning to the throbbing of a heart that is otherwise useless.

We are lives that occupy very little space in the world, you and I. We go unnoticed. The throbbing of our heart is only important to me and to you; no one else can hear it.

Here, the city has become silent, turning into a village of illicit lives, plaster and cardboard models of a well-being that does not exist.

This is a group of houses built piece by piece, over time, with scavenged materials. Closed within them, miserable solitudes dream of recouping by the weekend a wealth and power that they will never have. They won’t find it. Rebellion is like these streets that don’t go anywhere and end at some point without really leading to any specific place. Small dead-end vessels that pour blood into the mud.

The Romans are builders of roads, but over time they’ve lost their direction and their use.

Ours is a government that builds roads, but does not know how to pursue a course sensibly.

The Romans, over time, began to build roads not to get somewhere, but just to show that they could do it. Then, without having completed the project, they ended up stopping halfway, stranding themselves in a desolation without trees, a small unpaved piazza bordered by a fence of pink and green stakes.

I’m not a femme, you say.

I breathe. Air and an intense taste.

We do what I want, you say.

I don’t take off my glasses. I never take them off.

What about the money? you ask, your eyes looking for something outside.

Ghosts. I try to hear rustling. But all I hear is the blood flowing, in your body and mine.

Because if you don’t give me the money I’m not doing anything, you explain.

I scratch around in my residual rationality, trying to return to reality.

In the meantime, you open the door and get out.

It’s not true that all places are the same at night, because you don’t visit places only with your eyes. All places have odors (this one is briny, and permeated by the smolder of cheap barbecue with traces of smoke and sweat close by — yours, I think). There are colors as well. As I too get out, following you, I find myself staring at this fence of pink and green stakes. I am distracted.

I don’t sense the taste of death approaching.

It is a city that has known gladiators. They weren’t what they say, those men. They weren’t people of great skill, courage, and valor. Rather, they were muscular wretches bent on surviving, and violent, so much so that they sharpened their teeth to protect themselves from the lions. They felt the earth beneath their feet, and it was the last vestige of this world.

Gladiators, whose legend I like to imagine. They fought in the Circus Maximus, getting high on the crowd. I hear those cries, surpassed by the throbbing of a heart that is my own. There is a noise as I follow you toward the net.

Desire and fear.

A heart. Throbs.

I don’t hear the ghosts arrive.

Then, there they are.

I do not step back. The body is not alien to me. I fight.

Ghosts with sharp weapons.

A ghost shatters the fence. The stake is a jagged surface. I want to touch it, stop it, before it touches me.

I don’t run away, and I can’t hear anything except the blows. Is it the throbbing of a heart? This crazed heart of mine.

Blood flowing out of my body now, from the cut on my head. Blood that throbs. I take off my shirt, wrap it around the wound. On my knees.

I could pray.

I could.

I know.

Too far from God to pray.

I know.

This makes me, forever, a danger.

During a fight, you don’t have a real awareness of fighting. You protect the body because with that gone, the soul will no longer know where to live and will go away, lost.

The ghosts want my body. You don’t do anything. I try to guess your thoughts, I sense only fear, yours.

It’s not true that at a time of danger one feels fear. The only thing that you perceive is the urge to survive, against all logic.

And the throbbing of a heart.

Mine.

Let’s step down from the stage and watch.

Let’s watch the victim who defends himself like a gladiator of the past.

Let’s watch the insipid ghosts: There are too many of them for us to defend ourselves.

Let’s watch the victim on his knees, wiping up his blood.

Let’s watch the ghosts who grab him again.

Let’s watch the victim who escapes, who runs away.

Let’s watch the splinters of wood on the ground, slick with blood.

Let’s watch the sand stuck to the victim’s face.

Let’s watch the ghosts who become spattered with blood.

Let’s watch the victim falling forward.

Let’s watch the blows.

Let’s watch the victim who doesn’t move.

Let’s watch the ghosts run to the car.

Let’s watch a bloody hand resting on the roof of the car, leaving a mark.

Let’s watch the car start up, confidently, without haste.

Let’s watch the victim stretched out, motionless.

Let’s watch the car approach.

I can feel the taste of blood and sand on my lips. Like a gladiator.

Those times are over.

They never existed.

Let’s watch the car approach, without hesitation, driven by ghosts.

I have not lost consciousness.

I hear the throbbing of my heart.

I have not lost consciousness.

I am here.

I hear it.

The throbbing of my blood.

My heart.

The car. Is. Here.

The heart bursts.

Silence.

Time stops.

The car drives off, carrying the ghosts.

To Rome. The city of roads.

Eternal Rome by Antonio Scurati

The Melting Pot by Tommaso Pincio

Translated by Ann Goldstein

Via Veneto

It all began right in the middle of that endless season that went down in history as “the Great Summer.” Suddenly, without knowing how, I found myself in Vietnam. I was watching American soldiers fighting and dying in the jungle. Above me helicopters roared amid clouds of napalm. Then I looked up and saw the fan that hung from the ceiling of my room in the Hotel Excelsior.

It was only a dream and I was still in Rome. But it felt like a jungle in the tropics. The fan blades fluttered through the oppressive air of the room without providing any relief. They turned uselessly, like my life.

I was dripping with sweat; I had slept more than eight hours but I was still exhausted. It was an effort to get up. I ate breakfast listening to the same things the radio had been repeating every day for I don’t know how long. The daytime temperature never went below 110 degrees. The health department recommended not going outside before sunset.

I looked out the window as I finished drinking my coffee. It was getting dark, and throngs of foolish Chinese had begun to invade Via Veneto. I observed the rows of red lanterns and the signs crowded with ideograms whose meaning I didn’t know. Another torrid night of hell awaited me in the city of the apocalypse. Hardly the Dolce Vita. Now there was only summer, and Rome had become a world upside down, an enormous Chinatown where the heat forced people to live like vampires, sleeping by day and working by night. I should have left like everyone else when I still had the chance.

I went back to the bedroom and discovered that, just as they say, the worst has no limits. A girl had appeared out of nowhere and was lying motionless in my bed. She was half-naked and lay inert, on her stomach, her legs slightly spread, her arms extended along her sides, palms turned up, her face sunk in the pillow. She certainly looked dead. I hadn’t the slightest idea who she could be; it had been quite a while since I’d been intimate with a woman.

When I tried to turn the girl’s head I made another crazy discovery. Her face seemed to be stuck to the pillow. I tried several times. I finally took her by the hair and pulled her head, pressing the pillow against the bed. Nothing, the face wouldn’t come free. And in continuation of this theme that the worst has no limits, just at that moment someone knocked on the door.

With a corpse in the room it would have been wiser to pretend not to be home. What in the world would I have said if I had found myself facing the police? But I opened it anyway. Something compelled me to. Don’t ask what because I don’t know. Luckily it was Signor Ho, the manager of the hotel.

“I have the bill for the overdue rent,” he said. I glanced at the papers and gasped. He had nearly doubled the rent, holding me responsible for, among other things, the air-conditioning. I protested. The increase was robbery. As for air-conditioning, the system had never worked. Almost nothing worked in that lousy hotel.

“There are new rules now,” said Signor Ho. “Everyone pays for the cool air now. If your system broken, my worker fix it. If you don’t like new rules, you out. If you don’t pay, you out.”

It was pointless to argue, that Chinaman had a head harder than an anvil. Not to mention the business of the dead girl in the bed. I certainly couldn’t risk having him call his lackey in to repair the air-conditioning. So I tore the papers from his hand and told him not to worry, I would take care of everything as soon as possible.

“When is as soon as possible?”

I told him I didn’t know, but before he could reply, I said, “Tomorrow.” Then I slammed the door in his face. I went back to the bedroom with the hope that the corpse had disappeared. Maybe I’d had a hallucination. Unfortunately, the girl was still there. So I lay down on the bed next to her. I realize that lying down next to a dead woman may seem depraved. But I was exhausted from the heat and the stress. I needed to stretch out to get my ideas in order, and that was the only bed available. I spent several minutes staring at the girl’s hair. It was smooth and long. The shiny black made me think she was Chinese or one of the many other Asians who hung out in the neighborhood. Suddenly it moved. The hair, I mean. At first I thought it was the fan. But when it rose, and began to wave in the air like tentacles, I realized that there was something alive in it. The tentacles became an enormous octopus wrapped around the girl’s body. The whole room was now immersed in a blood-red ocean.

The thought that I was still dreaming barely surfaced; fear had gotten the better of me. I would have liked to get up and flee. Go I don’t know where. But I was paralyzed. I don’t mean metaphorically. I couldn’t move in the literal sense of the word. It was terrible being present at such a spectacle while having to remain as still as a statue. Then everything went dark and when I reopened my eyes the girl had disappeared.

There are people who give dreams a lot of weight. They believe all dreams have a meaning. They waste time analyzing them, thinking they’ll discover something or other about themselves or even their future. Nonsense. For me, dreams are only dreams, images that the mind seizes randomly in sleep, like the numbers that blindfolded children pick out of a lottery wheel. This has always been my opinion, at least. And, in fact, that night I got up without attaching too much importance to the strange nightmare I had woken from. I went to the bathroom as if nothing had happened and washed my hands and face. I avoided meeting my gaze in the mirror as I stretched my arm out for the towel. I knew I didn’t look good, I almost never do when I wake up. The deadly heat of the Great Summer didn’t help; it made me seem at least five years older, and, considering that I was no longer a boy, this bugged me.

I tried not to think of the heat or of the years gone by and wasted. I tried not to think at all. It wasn’t difficult; with the weather I had become quite good at emptying my mind. Not that I didn’t have things to think about. Money, for example. I was drowning in debts that I couldn’t pay. Someone else might have gone crazy. Not me. I took bills, requests for payment, injunctions, and all the other papers in which money I didn’t have was claimed from me, and I stuck them on one of those gadgets you used to see in trattorias. They’re called check spindles, I think. Or something like that. They consist of a big metal pin fixed to a wooden base, and you feel an almost sexual pleasure in sticking a bill on them. Don’t think badly of me, but it was like deflowering the economy. For me, there’s never been much difference between the economy and a woman. In the sense that I have never understood either one.

Yet I was very fond of my pin. I kept it in plain sight on the table in front of the window. I still have it, in fact. Only now it’s on the night table. If I spoke in the past tense it’s because I wish I had thrown it away. Things would have gone differently without the pin in the picture. On the other hand, not necessarily. Basically, the fault is not the pin’s but mine and the dream’s. Why in the world did I go around telling it? To Yin, in particular. I knew very well that there’s nothing to joke about with girls like her. And yet... Wait, I’m going too fast. I should begin at the beginning. Yes. But is there really a precise moment at which things begin? Like the Big Bang, so to speak.

I knew a guy years ago. I’ll spare you the details, but I saw him go downhill overnight. Let’s say he went to shit. I was surprised, because he had always seemed to me one of those people who know what they’re doing. I asked him how he’d gotten into such a state, how it had happened. “The way everything happens,” he answered. “Little by little at first. Then all of a sudden.” I wasn’t sure I understood. But now I know. Now it’s clear to me. Little by little at first, then all of a sudden. It’s like the Great Summer. Now it seems normal. The heat was infernal, the Romans had all escaped to the north, and here there were only Chinese and Bedouins. Plus some unlucky jerks like me. If I look at Rome now, it seems as if it was always like that. But when I think back to how this city was before the famous summer, I wonder if maybe I’m crazy. It seems to me that I live in a nightmare. And yet no. It’s all true. It was all true before and it’s all true now.

I remember the beginning of that famous summer very well. I decided to stay in Rome. I liked the deserted city, liked not having to wait in line at the post office or the supermarket. During the day I worked and at night I went to see the films that were shown in Piazza Vittorio. Coming home, I smoked a joint and fuck the rest. I wasn’t rolling in dough but I had a peaceful life, without bumps.

It began to get hot. But really hot. You, too, will remember. Old people died. The newspapers and television said that such a heat wave had never been recorded before. Every day they interviewed some expert who went on and on about climate change, pollution, melting glaciers, and emissions standards. We all nodded our heads yes, but we weren’t really listening. It was something in the future. In less than fifty years there will no longer be annual snowfall even on the highest mountains, said the experts. And what did we care about what would happen in fifty years? The only thing we were interested in was when the heat wave would pass. We waited for the storms of late August.

August passed. Then September passed, and October. Of the storms, no trace. The heat increased. When Christmas came, the temperature hovered around a hundred degrees. Not knowing what to do, people went to the beach. They thought that after New Year’s winter would finally come. Instead, the fires began and at that point people began to get seriously pissed off. They demanded answers, wanted to hear that sooner or later everything would go back to the way it was before. The experts said that such a phenomenon had never been recorded. But this was not an answer or reassurance.

In the end, people began moving to the north. More or less in the same period the first waves of Chinese arrived. People sold their houses and the Chinese bought them for cash. After a year it seemed like Shanghai in the days of opium smoking and bordellos. It was fascinating, from a certain point of view. So although I no longer had a job, I figured I’d stay.

My boss had decided to shut down operations. Business was getting worse and worse, and without ceremony he gave me my walking papers. In retrospect, it seems to me he behaved rather badly, but right then I didn’t care. The job had always been shitty, I wasn’t at all sorry to lose it. I took the severance pay with the firm intention of scraping by. It wasn’t a huge sum, but, thanks to the Great Summer, prices had tumbled. With a little economizing I could afford not to work for several years. If I moved to the north, that money would be gone in a few months and I’d have to start seriously slogging. I had no desire to do that.

Every so often my mother called, worried. She said that sooner or later the money would run out. “And then? What do you intend to do then?” she asked. A good question. Only I had no intentions. I told her I would think about it at the proper moment. According to my mother, I should join her in Lambrate, outside Milan. It seems there is a lot of work in that area. I was in Lambrate once. You have no idea what a god-awful place we’re talking about. Total desolation. “I’ll think about it, Mama,” I said. Then I hung up and rolled a joint or drained a couple of cans of beer. Not infrequently I did both together.

At the time I was not yet living on Via Veneto. I had taken a studio not far from Piazza Vittorio, in the middle of the historic Chinatown. I led a peaceful, orderly life. I got up, ate breakfast, and leafed distractedly through a book, waiting for the temperature to go down. Around midnight I went out. I wandered through the neighborhood, ending up inevitably at the market, and, with no real goal, struggled to make my way among shouting vendors and old Chinese women examining the greens displayed in the stalls. Often I stopped in front of a shop selling tropical fish and killed time watching those strange creatures circling the aquariums. I ate around 2 in the morning, usually noodle soup. Soon afterward the Forbidden City opened.

It’s there that my life changed forever, there that I met Yichang. The Forbidden City was a go-go bar. There had never been places like that in Rome before the Great Summer — I think because of the Vatican. Usually I stayed almost until closing time. I drank beer, watched the girls dance, waited for dawn. It was my favorite time of the night. Maybe because in my life I didn’t do much, while there it seemed to me that a lot of interesting things happened. I wouldn’t be able to say what things, exactly. Basically it was just a place where men went for whores.

One night Yichang sat down next to me. I had now been going to the Forbidden City regularly for several months and had the impression I hadn’t seen him before. I was wrong, because he knew me. In the sense that he had noticed me.

He asked if I liked the place and I said yes.

“I thought so,” he said.

I didn’t know what to say.

“Where did you come from?”

“Nowhere, I’m from Rome.”

He widened his eyes; I might have said I was a Martian.

“A Roman in Rome — a real rarity. May I buy you a drink?”

I shrugged. I had no desire to talk. I was used to minding my own business. I looked at the girls and my head emptied out in a pleasant way. This man was inserting himself between me and the best moment of my night. But I couldn’t refuse. He was Chinese, we were in a place run by Chinese and frequented by Chinese. Few Italians came to the Forbidden City, and those few were almost all northerners on vacation and often they were down-and-out.

“May I ask why you’ve stayed in Rome?”

I was about to say, No reason, but I stopped myself. The Chinese are busier than ants, they don’t trust idlers. “Business.”

“Ah,” he said, and shook his head as if to consider the answer. After a pause he asked, “And what do you do?”

Another good question. The world was full of people who were concerned with what I did. I said that I was a journalist, the first thing that crossed my mind.

“Really? And who do you write for?”

“A little here, a little there. Reports from the Roman front.” The truth is that I hadn’t the faintest idea how a newspaper works. I’ve never written a line in my life, not even a shopping list.

“I suppose you do well.”

“Not as well as you think. Let’s say I get by.”

He smiled, touched my bottle of beer with his. Then he changed the subject, luckily. I couldn’t go on shooting off my mouth about something I knew nothing about.

“Do you come here often?”

I took a swallow and nodded my head yes.

“You like this place, eh?”

“Yes, it’s not bad.”

He was silent for a while, looking at the girls rubbing their bodies against the steel poles.

I was under the illusion that the conversation had ended there, when he said, “And why do you like it?”

What the hell sort of question was that?

“You know why I’m asking? I’m asking because I’ve seen that you come here every night. You sit down, you have a couple of beers, you stay till closing, but you never ask a girl to your table. And I wonder why.”

“I don’t like to pay for sex.” It was true, but only in part. The real reason is that I couldn’t afford it. A night in itself didn’t cost much then. Thirty euros to the bar and fifty for the girl. Plus another twenty if you needed a room. But I knew how it worked. The girls were experts. Rarely was it a one-time deal, then over. A hundred today, a hundred tomorrow. Not counting gifts. Like nothing, at the end of the month you find yourself poorer by several thousand euros. Those girls could become worse than a drug — once they had hooked you, you couldn’t shake them off.

I could tell you a bunch of stories about people who squandered fortunes at the Forbidden City. Maybe that was why I liked going there. To watch others slowly go to ruin made me feel wise, someone who knows what’s what. I’m not sure if I’m explaining it well, but this, too, was a reassuring dynamic.

Life for me has always been a mystery; in fact, I’ve never done anything very well. At the Forbidden City, however, things seemed clear as daylight: Watch and don’t buy. If you understood this simple rule you could come back whenever you wanted. Every night, even.

“I understand, but then why do you come?”

Can you believe it? I said that it helped me put my ideas in order. Looking at the girls I was able to concentrate, focus better on the pieces that I had to send to the newspapers I worked for. At dawn I went home and typed out on the computer what I had mentally written at the Forbidden City.

“You’re saying that you come here to work?”

“In a certain sense,” I confirmed shamelessly.

“Then my conversation has disturbed you.”

“No problem. You have to disconnect the plug from time to time.”

“Very true.” At that point Yichang introduced himself. He told me his name and I told him mine. We shook hands.

We toasted our meeting with our beer bottles.

“I must confess something to you.” He paused, then: “I’ve studied you closely over the past few months, you know.”

I looked at him. Part of me foresaw that this man had in mind a precise plan.

“Your detachment is admirable. I wonder how you manage not to let yourself get involved in the situation. I mean, many of these creatures would be capable of bringing a dead man to life. What’s the matter, don’t you like women?”

“Oh no, I like them a lot. I told you, I come for other reasons.”

“Yes. You will agree, however, that your behavior is not like everyone else’s.”

I shrugged.

“However that may be, it’s good for you. No offense, you Italians risk being stung by those creatures. You’re not used to a certain type of woman. You let yourself be fooled by their childlike behavior, by their tender, defenseless ways. But they’re not at all defenseless. They’re whores. I’ve seen many Italians like you come here sure of themselves, they choose a girl, and take it all as a game. They end up badly. Then there are those who fall in love and end up worse. They get it in their heads to take the whore away, they think that underneath they’re good girls. They couldn’t make a more serious mistake. There are no good girls here. Chinese, Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian. All the same, all whores. And whores are like scorpions. You know the story of the scorpion, I imagine.”

“Of course,” I said distractedly, trying to convey that all this talk was starting to annoy me.

“With these girls it’s the same. You can’t expect them to change their nature. It’s something that you Italians tend to forget because of appearances. You know what some of them are capable of doing?”

“Cutting off your dick,” I said brusquely. I couldn’t take it anymore. The little lesson on the traps of the Forbidden City was really too much.

Yichang felt the blow, or at least so it seemed to me. “I see that you are informed.”

What had he taken me for, one of those fools who came down from the north in search of exotic adventures? I didn’t speak Chinese, but certain stories reached my ears anyway. Stories of girls who castrated clients because they hadn’t paid, or maybe simply because they’d begun a relationship with another whore, as if a man can’t have all the girls he wants. When they established that they had to break it off with you for good, they took you to bed without letting anything show — Asians are masters of hiding their rancor. Between one caress and another they gave you something to drink, and within a few minutes you were paralyzed.

It seems incredible that concoctions like that exist, and yet it’s true. I don’t know where they get it, but these girls have a kind of drug that immobilizes you. You’re conscious but you can’t move a finger. And while you’re in this condition, they... well, you understand, they reserve you a front-row seat so that you can enjoy the show.

I got up, intending to go home. The night was ruined.

“You’re leaving?”

“Yes.”

He detained me by resting a hand on my arm. “I hope I didn’t bother you with my conversation.”

“No, I’m just a little tired. Besides, I have an article to finish for tomorrow.”

“I understand.” Then, as if it were an afterthought, he asked me, “Do you live far away?”

I thought he would continue to bore me with his talk as he walked me home, so I told him the truth. “No, just around the corner.”

“You live in this neighborhood?”

“Yes, why?”

“Nothing, it’s just that a journalist... This is a poor neighborhood, dirty, noisy. Not exactly elegant.”

“It’s convenient,” I said.

“Convenient for what?” He didn’t give me time to answer. “Sit down. I have a proposal to make that might interest you. What would you say to living on Via Veneto? You know the Hotel Excelsior?”

Of course I knew it, a luxury hotel far beyond my reach.

“It’s no longer a hotel, and I’m sure that a professional like you can afford to pay a hundred euros for a suite.”

I was open-mouthed — it was less than half of what I paid for the one-room apartment, three hundred square feet, in Piazza Vittorio. Yichang explained that the Excelsior, after having been closed for several months, had been bought by a friend of his who had converted it into apartments. Almost all the apartments were already rented to very fashionable Chinese people. There was one, however, still free. Yichang’s friend was having difficulty finding a tenant because years ago a famous person had killed himself there. “One of those rock stars with long hair and torn jeans. I don’t remember his name.”

“You mean Kurt Cobain?”

Yichang snapped his fingers. “That’s right. You know, we Chinese are a superstitious people. Many of us believe in ghosts and don’t like to sleep in a room where someone took a gun and blew his brains out.”

I avoided explaining to him that things hadn’t gone exactly like that. It was more convenient that he and his Chinese friends continue to believe that Cobain had killed himself in the Hotel Excelsior.

“So do you think it might interest you?”

It might, yes. The prospect of moving to Via Veneto, of living in the city where I was born like a Russian prince in exile, attracted me quite a lot. And for only a hundred euros a month!

Yichang said he would introduce me to the manager of the Excelsior as soon as possible, maybe the following night. I didn’t know how to thank him. I wanted to repay him in some way, but Yichang waved his hands and shook his head, he wouldn’t even speak of it. He ordered another beer, made some comments about a girl, then wrinkled his forehead as if he had suddenly remembered something.

“There might be one thing,” he said. “Would you like to play a little card game?”

“Cards?”

“Yes. You know how to play poker?”

Obviously I knew the rules of poker, but I wasn’t at all the typical player. To tell the truth, cards had always bored me. But Yichang insisted, and when I tried to demonstrate my indifference to games of chance, he said, “What a lot of big words. I’m just proposing a little game among friends to pass the time. Nominal bets, just small change, enough to add some excitement. Come on, you can’t say no.”

Little game, big words. His way of speaking in diminutives and augmentatives made me uneasy. But he was right, I couldn’t refuse. Not if I really wanted to move to Via Veneto.

I returned home at 9 in the morning. I lay on the bed and, staring at the blades of the fan rotating above me, I thought over the bizarre events of the night. Or rather, the events that I should have found bizarre but that at the moment appeared to me only manna fallen from heaven.

First of all, it should have seemed bizarre that a Chinese guy was so expansive with a stranger, and, furthermore, a Westerner. Then there was Yichang’s perfect Italian and the business of the suite at the Hotel Excelsior. Even a child would have been suspicious. But as I said, at that time I had a tendency not to think too much. In a single stroke, while drinking beer and looking at whores, I had found a new place to live and won two hundred and fifty euros: I confined myself to thinking this.

Yes, because between one thing and another the little game had gone on for hours and, in spite of the fact that the bets were limited, I had left the Forbidden City with a tidy sum in my pocket. I may not have been a great player, but Yichang showed himself to be even worse. Above all he was obstinate. In the sense that he seemed purposely to do his utmost to lose. And this was the thing that should have made me suspicious. But I was intoxicated by the ease with which I was winning money.

Yichang kept his word. That night we went together to the Excelsior and he introduced me to Signor Ho. There was no problem. After a few preliminaries and a handshake, the suite was officially mine. For a deposit I left the two hundred euros that I had won at cards. With a warm smile, Yichang said that I couldn’t refuse him the right to recoup.

I couldn’t, as a matter of fact. We decided to meet at the Forbidden City at 3 in the morning. I won that night, too, but a little less, because Yichang succeeded in taking a few hands himself. I discovered that losing, rather than worrying me, increased my desire to keep playing. For reasons that in time I understood but which were then completely obscure to me, winning a hand after having lost one made me feel stronger. So that I even considered losing some on purpose, a little out of vanity and a little out of pure enjoyment. In spite of the money I won, however, cards still essentially bored me. I never changed my ideas on the subject. For me, there’s nothing more tedious or foolish than poker. Maybe that’s why I remained a terrible player.

You understood perfectly, I said terrible. Little by little, I don’t even know how, I began to lose. And the more I lost the more I raised the stakes and the more I wanted to keep playing. Every night I went to the Forbidden City, I sat at a secluded table, and I played. I played and lost. From time to time, raising my head from the cards, I’d find my eyes meeting those of a girl who was dancing, and for an instant I’d feel nostalgia for the time when drinking a beer and looking at whores had been the crowning moment of my daily routine.

But it was really just an instant. In less than a second I was plunged back into the idiotic questions that assail the mind of a cardplayer. Pass, bluff, stand. All bullshit, and the moral of this bullshit was that I lost and Yichang won.

Yichang and his friends. Because a couple of other players always joined us, and none spoke a word of Italian. They won, too, but less than Yichang.

In the space of two months I accumulated debts of nearly two hundred thousand euros. A sum I had never seen in my life. Yichang seemed to take it lightly. We played with chips and when, at dawn, the accounts were settled, Yichang wrote everything down in a notebook, but he never asked me for a cent. In fact, he told his friends that he would be my guarantor. He said that there was no problem. That I was an established professional who wrote for the papers. When he said that, I trembled inside.

Then came the crash, the devaluation, or I don’t know what. As I said, I’ve never understood anything about the economy. The fact is that prices began to rise, including the rent on the suite at the Excelsior. So my debts spread like an oil spill, and with that we finally come to the time when I had the strange dream of the dead girl in the bed.

Later that night, Yichang asked me if by any chance I could lend him a thousand euros. I had gotten to know these people a little and I am well aware that when a Chinese person circles around a problem, it means that he’s presenting the bill. He had said “lend” but in effect he meant pay. And not only a thousand euros but also the rest of my debt, or at least a considerable part of it. I had no idea where to go to get fifty, let alone a thousand and the rest. I told him that he must excuse me but I was a bit short.

“A bit short in what sense?” He couldn’t understand how a journalist like me didn’t have enough to lend a friend a thousand euros.

I had to tell him the truth. I would have been better off making up some more nonsense, but I saw no way out. And then I’d had it up to my ears. The situation was tearing me to pieces. I wanted to go back to my old life and stop playing, stop losing, stop fooling a friend. Because Yichang had behaved like a true friend, he had shown that he trusted me. And how had I rewarded him?

I would have liked to see him outside of the poker game. Have a few beers and talk about this and that. Yichang was in fact an amiable companion, a cultivated person. While we played, he often recounted interesting details about the history of Rome. He was a real expert. He had read Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire five times. Before meeting Yichang I didn’t even know the names of the seven hills, but thanks to him I learned a lot of things. For example, that the greatness of Rome consisted above all in its eternal decadence.

I wonder if my life went as it did because I’m a Roman. It’s consoling to be able to convince ourselves that our ruin is a kind of predestination, something genetic, or some such nonsense. It relieves you from the obligation of being sorry for all you have not done or could have not done. Like telling Yichang the truth.

I didn’t expect him to take it so badly. I imagined that he would be pissed off, of course. I owed him a boatload of money, basically, and maybe he had already made plans for how to spend it. But what happened caught me off balance. He made me understand that I had understood nothing, excuse the wordplay.

On the table were the cards, the bottles of beer, a couple of ashtrays full of butts, and the piles of chips. Yichang raised his arms, held them suspended a moment, then pounded his fists down violently. The objects tottered, tipped over, fell to the floor. The two other Chinese guys gave signs of smiling. I bit my lower lip and hung my head.

“Look at me,” said Yichang.

I did.

His face was a mask of tension. He was breathing hard through his nostrils. He stared at me for moments that, it seemed, would never pass, then he pointed at me with his index finger and uttered my full name.

“Tommaso Pincio. You... you... you...”

He never said what he was about to say. He got up abruptly and went off somewhere. The other two Chinese sat motionless in their places, staring at me. I thought it was best not to move, either.

At the Forbidden City, no one noticed a thing. All was proceeding as usual. The girls’ bodies swayed lazily to the rhythm of the music. One of them came down from the stage to sit on the knees of a client, an Asian man of around fifty.

I recall that at that moment they were playing a remix of “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).” The one by the Global Deejays, you know it? A rather silly tune, but then the Chinese are not very sophisticated. Every so often in the song you hear a female voice saying the names of various cities. Paris, London, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and a bunch of others. Even Baghdad. And I would have liked to find myself anywhere, including Baghdad, but the Forbidden City.

Then Yichang returned to the table. He gathered up the cards, lit a cigarette, and said, “Okay, let’s get back to the game.”

The expression on his face was indecipherable. He seemed to have calmed down, but I glimpsed a light in his eyes that I didn’t like. I tried to say that I would rather not play. I wanted to go home. I felt like a shit. I had lied. I had accumulated a mountain of debts that I would never be able to pay.

“Nonsense.”

“No, seriously. I lied to you and I can’t forgive myself.”

“It’s true, but for that precise reason you can’t withdraw.”

I didn’t understand.

“You see, if you withdraw now I’ll be forced to have your dick cut off by one of the girls.” He stared at me for a few seconds, then: “I was joking, obviously.” But he didn’t have the tone of someone who was joking. I tried to show a hint of a smile. We played. Every so often I glanced at the other two, but they gave no sign of having understood what Yichang had said, and he hadn’t uttered a single word in Chinese. I had a lot of ugly thoughts. I think it was then that I began to use my brain again, a little. However, I promptly got into another one of my usual messes.

Incredible to say, but I had started winning again. Yichang didn’t seem at all disturbed by this. In fact, he began to make some jokes and he told a story about the origins of Rome, as if nothing had happened. I felt tremendously embarrassed and wanted to contribute to the conversation. Since I was short of subjects, I had this bright idea of recounting the strange dream I’d had the night before.

Yichang listened attentively but said nothing. He continued to lose. When we stopped playing he was down by almost three hundred euros. It wasn’t much compared to the two hundred thousand I owed him, but at least it was something. He took his notebook and updated it, saying that we would see each other the following night at the usual time.

I don’t know if it had something to do with telling Yichang my dream, but the following night there was something new. Sitting to one side, near our table, was a girl. Yichang introduced her. Her name was Yin. Like all the girls in the Forbidden City, she was very pretty. I didn’t remember having seen her before, but that didn’t mean much. Ever since I had thrown myself body and soul into cards, I had stopped paying particular attention to what happened on the stage.

Yichang said that she was there to serve us. He asked if I had anything against it. All this was rather odd. Usually, when we finished our beers we raised a finger and immediately more were brought. Our needs were always limited to this. I didn’t see how this girl could serve us. But could I make an objection?

The first few nights slid by smooth as glass. I continued to win big. I had recouped almost half my debt. Within two weeks I found myself ahead by a hundred euros. From the stable to the stars.

“You see, Yin brings you good luck,” Yichang said every so often, smiling in that strange way he had on those nights. And when Yichang made these remarks, Yin smiled too, staring at me with a look full of meaning.

I shielded myself, embarrassed. I had discovered that I was not at all immune to Yin’s charm. She was beautiful, but there was something else. I don’t know how to explain it. Maybe it was the fact that she sat near our table the whole time without saying anything. She didn’t even bring us the beers, as I had imagined she would. She was just a presence. She seemed to be there only to be looked at, and, indeed, I looked at her. I couldn’t help giving her furtive glances. And every time I did so, I found that her eyes were on me.

I felt good. I was winning, and having a girl gaze at me the whole time made me feel... how to put it? Stronger, more of a man.

The cards had extinguished in me any desire, and so it had been an eternity since I’d been with a woman. But now it was different. I felt reborn and was beginning to have thoughts about Yin.

This didn’t escape Yichang. At the end of one night, in Yin’s presence, he said, “Why don’t you take her home?”

I pretended not to understand.

“Yes, you should celebrate. You’ve started winning again. You’re ahead by seven hundred euros. It’s a whim you can satisfy. I’ve seen how you look at her, what do you think? And I bet Yin wouldn’t mind. Right, Yin?”

Yin smiled without saying anything, as always.

I, however, felt different. I told you, I felt as if I’d been reborn. So the words came out of my mouth by themselves: “You would really come with me?” Only an idiot would ask a whore a question like that.

She nodded her head yes and I brought her home. We made love all day, heedless of the heat and the sweat. At sunset we went out. I asked her if she wanted to have breakfast with me. She nodded. What did I expect her to say? We didn’t speak. We only gazed into each other’s eyes as we ate. We had no need for words, we felt satisfied. Then again, maybe I shouldn’t use the plural. It was I who felt satisfied. She had simply done what she was paid for — something I began to forget, despite the fact that I had always boasted that I knew how things worked at the Forbidden City.

The fact that I’d paid nothing so far had its weight. I supposedly had seven hundred euros available. Yichang scrupulously noted my winnings in his famous notebook, but he had not yet given me a cent and I hadn’t found the courage to ask him for anything. How could I demand that he pay me after what had happened?

Nor did Yin demand anything. When I raised the subject she shook her head and said, smiling, “Me know you many money Yichang. Me not care. Me like you.” I was struck by hearing her speak in the broken English of Asians. I realized that until then I had never heard the sound of her voice. A sound that I would not hear again for a long time. We stayed together. It became a kind of routine. I played, I won some euros, I said goodbye to Yichang and went home with Yin. We made love and then watched television or simply lay on the bed. Without ever saying anything. Or rather: It was she who didn’t open her mouth. I sometimes did. For example, I made comments on the heat or asked if she felt like something to eat. Sometimes I mentioned that I liked her. Whatever I said to her, Yin nodded her head yes. Which didn’t bother me. In fact, I found it relaxing and, in a strange way, I began to fall in love with her. I say strange because I knew nothing about Yin. Where she came from, how old she was, what went on in her head.

In time I began to make grandiose speeches after we made love. I talked to her about myself, about how my life had been and how I would have liked it to be. I told her my opinion on all kinds of things. If there was something after death, if I believed in God or extraterrestrials. Ideas. She seemed to listen because from time to time she nodded. But the truth is that deep down it wasn’t so important whether she really listened. Otherwise I wouldn’t have spoken in Italian. What the fuck, the only words I had heard her say were “Me not care. Me like you.” There was a serious probability that she understood nothing.

One day I felt in a particularly romantic vein and told her the dream. I don’t know why, but it came to mind. Suddenly, I realized that after that absurd dream my life had changed. I had begun to win and I had met her. Maybe dreams had a meaning after all. She nodded yes without saying anything. She didn’t seem at all moved by the fact that the girl in the dream was dead. A detail that I noted only later.

Some more weeks passed during which everything seemed to keep running smooth as glass. I was becoming richer and richer, if only in Yichang’s notebook. Sex with Yin was fantastic and every day I was more in love with her. I was convinced that she felt the same, because from the beginning she had never asked me to pay her. In my screwed-up brain I had conceived the idea that her “Me like you” was worth more than “Me know you many money Yinchang.”

Until one night, after months had gone by, she decided to open her mouth, and she did it to ask for money. In her broken English she said that, between one fuck and another, I owed her something like fifty thousand euros. If I considered the request in purely virtual terms there was nothing to worry about. According to Yichang’s notebook I was nearly a millionaire. But in my pocket I had barely a hundred euros and my bank account wasn’t much better off.

Yin told me I don’t know what nonsense about her family in Cambodia; in other words, she really needed money. She wanted actual money, not numbers written in a stupid notebook, and she wanted it right away. Suddenly I saw her for what she was, a whore from the Forbidden City. Maybe she loved me, in the animal-like way that binds those girls to their source of income. Nonetheless, she was a scorpion, as Yichang put it.

I began to fear for my lower regions and I explained the problem to Yichang. I said that if it had been for myself I would never have asked. And, in fact, for myself I asked nothing. Only a couple of thousand euros for Yin. A laughable sum compared with what he owed me.

“Laughable, you say. Once I asked you for only half that, you remember?”

“I know, I behaved very badly. But so much time has passed. Let’s not dig it up again, please. Now it’s different.”

“You’re right, it’s different. Now I’m the one who finds myself a little short. Actually, I’m very short.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Not at all.”

“You mean you won’t give me the two thousand euros?”

“I can’t even give you a cent.”

“But what do I tell Yin?”

“Tell her you love her.”

“Do you take me for a fool? What’s a whore going to do with my love?”

“Until today I never heard you speak of Yin in those terms.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t know. Anyway, I’m afraid there is no other possibility.” With that, Yichang said goodbye, leaving me alone with my problems.

Overnight I had become broke again. There were a lot of Chinese people I owed money to, who had given me credit because Yichang guaranteed me. I understood that from now on everything would be different.

But the more immediate problem was represented by Yin. At least, so I saw it at the moment. Maybe I was getting too paranoid, but that girl’s long silences suddenly seemed to me threatening.

I explained that Yichang was a little short.

“You not have money you?”

I tightened my lips and shook my head. I told her I was sorry.

It was a bad moment but things settled down. I told her that I loved her and that I would stay with her.

“Me big problem now.”

“Yes, I know.”

“You take care me?”

“Of course, Yin.”

She peered at me without saying anything. I knew the meaning of that look. I stuck a hand in my pocket and gave her everything I had.

“Only this? You not take care me if you only this.”

I said again that I was sorry and that I loved her.

She stared into space for a very long time. I saw that her lips were trembling.

“You not good with me. You very bad,” she said finally, her eyes bright. Then she got up and left. I didn’t try to stop her.

I wish this ugly story had ended there. For a while I thought it had. Yin didn’t appear. I stopped going to the Forbidden City and had lost sight of Yichang. I no longer drank, I no longer smoked marijuana. I had even found a job. Not much, but little by little I was able to pay my debts and get back on my feet. I had put the pin with the bills on the night table so that I could look at it before going to sleep and meditate on my past errors. I would become a new person, this was my intention.

Maybe I would even have succeeded if Yin hadn’t knocked at my door one day. She said she wanted to talk to me. I let her in. She came straight into the bedroom, sat down on the bed, and, with her head bent, waited for me to join her.

I sat down beside her. “A lot of time has passed,” I said.

She nodded in her usual way. It wasn’t so long, really. Only a couple of months. But my style of life was so changed that to see Yin again was like diving into a distant past.

“You’re well?”

She nodded again.

“I’ve thought about you a lot.” I don’t know why I said it. Yes, the memory of her occasionally surfaced but only as one of the many things that had happened, one of my many mistakes. It wasn’t true that I had thought of her a lot. Not in that sense, at least.

She said nothing.

I felt embarrassed at having lied to her, and since the silence that fell after my words was unbearable, I asked what she had come to talk about.

She let some more moments pass, as if she had to gather her thoughts, then she raised her head and, looking me in the eyes, said, “Me like you. Think only this very long time.”

We made love as in the old days. The next day neither of us said anything, but to me it was clear that we were together again. Yin moved in with me. Or, rather, that day she stayed in my suite at the Hotel Excelsior and never left.

At sunset I headed off to work and when I came back at dawn I found her where I had left her, lying on the bed. She got up only to take a shower or get something to eat from the refrigerator. She never opened her mouth, just as in the old days.

I didn’t think of asking her what had impelled her to return to me, nor did I ask if she had resolved her problems or how. It was enough to find her there, ready and available only for me. Of course, I wondered what was the sense of a relationship like that. Because the fact is that I no longer loved her as I believed I once had. Yin was now like a bed dog. A kind of domestic animal, something comfortable to have in the house. Maybe my feelings were not very uplifting, but I decided not to beat my brains out. If it was all right for her, why should I have to make a lot of trouble for myself?

The end of this bad story came when I had stopped thinking about it. About the past, I mean. It happened sometimes that I remembered my nights at the Forbidden City, the girls who danced on the stage and the things that were said about them. But it happened less and less frequently, and anyway it was something so distant that it felt alien. It was as if neither Yin nor I had ever been the person of that time.

I began to think of us as a real, if somewhat peculiar, couple. I even considered asking Yin if she would like to have a child. This, because she seemed more and more affectionate. Not that she did anything apart from being silent and lying on the bed. I don’t know, it was something in her habits, in the way she made love. She seemed — how to put it? — really in love.

I felt serene. Until one day I found her sitting cross-legged on the bed waiting for me to come home from work. On the night table, beside the old pin with the bills, there was a bottle of red wine with two glasses. She poured the wine and offered me a glass.

Nothing like that had ever happened. Her proposing a toast, that is. So I asked her if there was something I didn’t know that we had to celebrate.

She shook her head smiling. And then: “You know everything. Me like you.” She touched my glass with hers and drank.

“I love you,” I said. I don’t know if it was true. I was happy that she had made the gesture, and was happy that she was there for me every day, on my bed, waiting for my return. If this can be called love, then I loved her.

I drank the wine, and was about to kiss her, but she moved her face. She grabbed me by the hair and pushed me down, on her breast. I began to kiss her there, then on the neck and behind the ear. I tried again to bring my lips to hers, and again she moved. Suddenly, in a flash, I understood. And in understanding I lost consciousness, with an acid taste in my mouth that wasn’t wine.

I came to as in the dream, paralyzed. And what else can I say? It’s not true that before you die you see your life go by in an instant. This didn’t happen to me, at least. In that final moment, I thought only of how blind and stupid a human being can be. I’m referring to all the things I hadn’t realized in those months. For example, the way I began to win again after telling Yichang that I was in no position to pay my debts.

Then I also wondered if anything would have been different if I hadn’t told her and Yichang my dream. And I almost reached the conclusion that certain things would have happened anyway. I say almost because when Yin took the pin with the bills and stuck it in the pillow, I understood that she was about to do something different from what I thought. She didn’t intend to emasculate me. I saw her sit on my stomach. Then she raised the pillow over her head and stared for a moment at a precise point between my eyes. Everything lasted less than a second, and maybe that’s why I didn’t see any film go by. I thought only that it’s really astonishing how a person can be capable of not thinking things through.

Last Summer Together by Cristiana Danila Formetta

Translated by Ann Goldstein

Ostia

I’m not dressed properly. I realize it from the way the other passengers are staring at me.

They’re right. The train headed to Ostia-Lido is gritty, dust-coated, and none of them would dare set foot in it wearing a white linen suit. Here in Rome, dirt has a fascination with soft colors, insisting on the palest tints, and enjoys removing from them every trace of whiteness. My suit will soon be covered by a thin patina of grime, but that doesn’t matter now. I no longer distinguish colors or the faces of the people around me. I no longer hear their voices, I have no desire to listen to their words, what they say, what they think.

English, that man in shorts and flip-flops said when he saw me arrive. And the fat woman next to him nodded her head yes.

English. Of course, that explains everything. My clothes, my composure, even the indifference I show toward the curious gazes of the other travelers. For them, my detachment is not the result of a natural disgust for a rude, vulgar segment of humanity. No, if I’m like this it’s because I’m English. If I act like this, it’s because I was born in a place where to sit silently reading a book is not yet considered a crime. Criminal, if anything, is the insistence with which a girl keeps asking me question after question, in an absurd mixture of English and Italian. She thinks I’m a tourist, she thinks I’m here just to dive into the dirty waters of Rome. And she won’t stop talking to me about the Colosseum, about the marvels of the city, about places that in her view I really cannot do without seeing. Stupid girl. If she only knew how much beauty I’ve seen, and how much pain I’ve felt in the face of its enchantment. But she’s incapable of understanding. She’s young, but already she has the obtuse gaze of an old woman. And, just like an old woman, every so often she loses the thread of the conversation, wanders, and no longer knows what she’s saying.

“You know Pasolini was murdered at Ostia?” she asks. Then, without waiting for an answer, she adds, “Of course, he was asking for it...” Then, as if unconsciously, I got up and left the compartment, overwhelmed by the brutality of that statement, but far more disturbed by the rapidity with which the recollection of a long-ago crime had brought back to mind other crimes, other horrors.

There’s nothing odd about it. The history of Rome was written in blood. Every street, every building of this city conceals within its walls the sighs of executioners and their victims. And if everyone on this train stopped talking, even just for an instant, those moans would be heard here too, on this dirty train. But for now the noise is louder. It covers up the voices. It suffocates the cries. Just as you did, my dear Charlotte. Only you had the power to banish evil thoughts. You did it for almost thirty years. Thirty winters and thirty summers together, the last right here in Rome, visiting museums, walking on the beaches at Ostia, like a happy young married couple. That summer, you smiled, Charlotte. The way the child smiled who came and sat beside me. You, too, looked at me and smiled like that, while Alzheimer’s was already eating away your brain. A simple, pure smile, and yet so distant, letting me understand that I was losing you. And you were losing the power to keep those voices at bay. Soon, my love, your smile would no longer rein in desire, the call of the young bodies that crowded the beaches of Ostia that summer. Male bodies. Bodies of tall, tanned youths. Memories of a past that you, my sweet wife, had been able to erase, giving me the illusion that nothing had ever happened. Yet it took so little to make my confidence crumble. A look, a few words were enough. It was enough that he told me his name.

Mario. Yes, his name was Mario, I haven’t forgotten it. And Mario is the name I’ve given my shameful act. Mario is the name I’ve assigned to my lies.

I just bought him a drink, Charlotte. There’s nothing wrong with having a soft drink together, a Coke. And yet in the depths of my heart I already knew that the years of peace you had given me were about to end.

You had changed me, Charlotte. You had transformed me into an adult who lived in a world of adults, a world where there was no room for young men with crew cuts and tanned skin.

Thank you, sir, the boy had said, taking big gulps of his Coke. He must have been barely fifteen, but already the expression of a scoundrel was painted on his face. Of a little adult. The bartender at that kiosk on the beach, Antonio, or whatever the hell his name was, seemed to confirm my impression.

“This kid here is a rogue,” he said in a friendly fashion. “He always finds a way of getting something from the customers.” At those words, I was tempted to withdraw, to make a prudent retreat, as if I feared that a stranger could read my mind and discern my guilty thoughts. Because, Charlotte, I had done something ugly. I had looked at that boy a moment too long. And in that moment all my desire returned from where I had buried it, leaving me like that, like a Lazarus come back to life, wandering alone on the beach, anxious to see that boy again, to hold him in my arms.

Charlotte, I don’t understand why you had to die first. I surely deserved such an end more than you. But destiny tricked us both, and now I’m certain that you’re looking down at me. So go on looking. Look at me, on this train again, when I had sworn to myself that I would never return to Rome, that I would never walk the white beaches of Ostia. And yet now I’m here, and now not even you can slow my descent into the Underworld. If I could, I would have done it two years ago. And even then you didn’t stop me. You, Charlotte, you let the darkness enter my life like an unwanted guest. You opened the door to the night that made me a murderer. You gave it the keys to my house, my life. A curse, Charlotte. Why did you do this to me? Why did you let me believe that you could give me peace, when in reality you granted me only a truce. If you had told me the truth, I would not have done what I did. I would not have waited for Mario at sunset, with the excuse of buying him another Coke; I would not have followed him home, just to know where he lived; I would not have bought him that ball just to see him happy. I swear, Charlotte. If I had known I couldn’t stop, I wouldn’t have done any of the things I did in the days of our last summer together.

I wouldn’t have told Mario that I would take him to a nice place for a pizza that night, a place here in Rome that only I knew, and that he was not to say a word to anyone. It’s a secret, Mario. Don’t tell anyone; otherwise, no pizza.

My God, why did a scoundrel like him pay any attention to me? Why on that particular night were you sicker than usual, did you seem scarcely aware of me?

There are many questions that I can’t answer, and even today, Charlotte, I wonder why I didn’t take Mario to have a pizza for real. It would have been so simple to get to central Rome, I had even rented a car. But at the last minute I changed my mind. I changed course, and brought Mario to the Idroscalo, the old seaplane station. I stopped the car and sat peering at the darkness all around.

You don’t know it, Charlotte. Tourists don’t go there. It’s an unreal place of mud, garbage, and weeds. And it’s been like that for thirty years, from the day of Pasolini’s murder. A place abandoned by God and man, where the voice of that violence still sounds in the silence. The voice of an ancient violence, which Rome has never ceased to conceal. And that night the voice was heard again, like an echo, in the deserted fields of the Idroscalo. Loud enough to cover Mario’s words, his protests. What are we doing here, let’s go, he kept saying to me. But I couldn’t hear him. I took him by the arm. I hit him to make him shut up. Then Mario got frightened and ran away. He opened the door and began running through the fields. He ran like a rabbit, Charlotte. Fast, like a frightened child. I started the car and went straight after him. I called to him to stop, but children, you know, they never do what they’re told. Children are never still. Children are never quiet. They can’t keep a secret, even if they’ve promised. I alone could silence him, I alone could stop him. I pressed my foot to the gas. Faster. It was essential to stop him. Before Mario could tell anyone what had happened. I had to end his life. End his world there, in those fields.

My world today goes on turning, Charlotte.

No one knows, no one has ever suspected.

Mario was always out, and his parents were not too concerned about him. Likely he fell victim to someone with evil intentions.

The fault is the family’s, society’s.

The fault is this city’s.

Rome was born in blood, and blood always calls forth more blood. I believe it, Charlotte. The voice of violence shouts every night through these streets, but now among the victims’ cries I seem to hear my name too. And it’s Mario’s voice that accuses me. A voice louder than the others.

It was you, he says. And yes, it was me. I killed that poor boy. It’s no use turning your head and pretending that nothing happened. I tried, but it was all in vain. Two years have passed, and the sound of those broken bones still echoes in my head. That sound is my company day and night, it won’t let me sleep, won’t let me think.

He asked for it, Charlotte. From that day, I’ve been repeating this, over and over, but I’m not persuaded.

Mario’s voice has followed me everywhere. It pursued me over land and sea, until I was exhausted, until it made me say Enough. Enough now. I’m too tired to escape again.

I’m dying, Charlotte. In the end his voice found me. It crossed the silence with which Rome remembers its dead, and murmured in my ear the word “cancer.” And at my age cancer is unforgiving, as you well know. I’m going to die, my dear. And I’m going to die here at Ostia, where everything began. I’m going to die on the white beaches of this blood-colored city, like an old whale that has lost its way in the ocean. And in a way, my love, that’s just how it should be.