The American Read online

  If you go down the vialetto, turn left on the Via Ceresio and then left again at the Via de’ Bardi, you will come to the foot of a long flight of marble steps. They are but a metre or two wide at the base but, halfway up the hill, they widen until, at the piazza at the top, they are perhaps fifteen metres wide. The steps are worn smooth with age and the tread of pilgrims. Today, however, only shoppers struggle up or down them, lovers with their arms about each other’s waist, tourists with cameras and video camcorders. Sparse wisps of grass grow between the stones and litter blows over them. Of late, and in the early hours, the steps have become the haunt of addicts. Several times recently, I have noted discarded hypodermic needles lying against the side walls.

  The marble is of poor quality, chosen for durability rather than colour. It is veined with dark, sooty stains like the forearms of the addicts.

  Traffic zips by the top of the steps. The pavement is very wide there and a number of street entertainers and vendors gather at this spot in the tourist season. One is a flautist. He has his stand under an umbrella tied to a no-parking sign upon which a frustrated driver has spray painted a derisive non sempre.

  The flautist is a tubercular young man, his skin pasty and his eyes hollow. I suspect he is one of the early hours crowd, the heroin fixers and dope smokers, the twentieth-century lost, the modern leper or plague victim. He carries no bell. Instead, he has a chipped and dirty flute.

  Despite the condition of his instrument, he makes the most beautiful music. His speciality is the baroque. He has adapted several pieces for the flute and plays these with a detachment both moving and pathetic. He squats beneath his umbrella, a grubby cushion under his haunches, and his fingers run up and down his black flute with a rapid fluidity of which one would not expect him capable. He seems never to run short of breath and only takes a break between tunes in order to sip at a bottle of cheap, coarse wine. He takes his lunch in a nearby bar, if he has had a good morning’s custom, eating bread with a few anchovies and drinking Cerasuolo diluted with mineral water.

  Sometimes, I can hear him in the evenings, his music drifting over the rooftops to the loggia, competing with the sundown chorus of cicadas. I sit quietly, the lantern glowing from the shelf under the parapet, and think of him as a part of my trade, my profession. I am the bringer of infinity, the harbinger of eternity and he is my minstrel, my Blondel playing up to me in my tower of death.

  Another entertainer is a puppeteer. In the daytime, he stands behind a stage draped with candy-striped cloth like a Victorian Punch-and-Judy stall. His daytime puppets move to the pull of strings. They dance and cavort, a red-faced clown executes skilful somersaults without tangling his wires, and recount nursery rhymes or local legends in high, squeaky voices. Local school-children, tourists’ offspring and old folk make up the audience. They laugh together, the young and old infantiles, and throw small change or telephone tokens into a tin bowl placed beside the stall. Every so often, the puppeteer’s foot appears from beneath the cloth and toes the bowl out of sight. There is a rattle of coins and the bowl, almost empty, reappears. As with every busker the world over, the bowl is never seen totally void of generosity. Money begets more money as if pennies in the basin are an investment and the audience provide the interest.

  At night, the puppeteer changes his show. The string puppets are folded into a case, and he dons glove puppets. These are not the ridiculous figures of the daytime performances, the clowns and policemen, the schoolteachers and dragons, old ladies and wizards. These are now monks and soldiers, ladies of fashion and gentlemen of leisure. The stories they tell do not centre upon legend but upon sex. The characters speak no longer in shrill voices but now sound like modern, real men and women. Every tale involves a seduction and at least one puppet has a rampant cock filled, no doubt, by the puppeteer’s little finger, which he thrusts up the skirts of one of the ladies in the narrative. For obvious reasons, the puppeteer not being double jointed and his stall being narrow, the puppets fuck standing up.

  Local men watch these tales with hilarity. Lovers stand before the stall and giggle, later to disappear into the Parco della Resistenza dell’ 8 Settembre to try out the method for themselves. The tourists, usually with their children in tow, watch for a while, not understanding a word of the story and walking off hastily as the screwing begins. French tourists are the only group not to drag their children away when the pornography commences. Honeymooners, I have noticed, watch the longest.

  Of the vendors at the steps, my favourite is toothless old Roberto, who always wears a pair of stained black trousers, a grey and filthy waistcoat, a collarless shirt and chain-smokes black tobacco. He also has a thumbnail fully three centimetres long. This is the only clean part of his anatomy. Roberto sells watermelons.

  I buy my melons only from him. He is convenient, his barrow being comparatively close to my apartment: the way there is downhill and a melon can weigh over ten kilos. He also cuts open a melon for one to judge the quality of his wares. When a melon is chosen, he tests it for ripeness and solidity, tapping a tattoo upon the skin with his long nail. He listens to the echo. I have yet to buy unripe or over-ripe fruit from him.

  The church across the piazza from the pornographic puppeteer, the dying flautist and the sounder of watermelons is dedicated to San Silvestro. Which Silvestro has his memory enshrined in this foundation I do not know. The townsfolk claim it is Silvestro I, the Roman pope who climbed on to the Throne of Christ in 314 and of whom little is known or supposed save that, in trying to establish his notch on history’s tree, he claimed the Emperor Constantine donated to him, and his successors in the see of Rome, primacy over all Italy. It was a shrewd move for a man destined to be one of the first saints who was not a martyr. However, it could equally well be Silvestro Gozzolini, a twelfth century lawyer who turned to the priesthood, criticised his bishop for loose living, went into self-imposed solitary confinement, came out to found a monastery near Fabriano and had a dozen monasteries named after him on his death, as a strict interpreter of the rule of Benedict. To this day, the Silvestrines are a Benedictine congregation: Gozzolini was therefore even shrewder than his namesake. Today the monasteries mostly reduced to rubble, there is still a nearby street named after his followers. But, there again, there are many other Silvestros, men who lived and died in tiny villages, divined a well or cured a sick cow and were seen as vessels of the Holy Spirit.

  For whomever it exists, the building is impressive. It has a square front, such as is commonly found in these mountains, with a round window above the main door and sets of columns rising against the stonework. Within, the cavern of the church is as cool as the interior of one of Roberto’s watermelons.

  The floor of the nave is tiled with black and white slabs of marble intended, no doubt, to imitate a fifteenth-century carpet without affording the worshippers the true touch of fabric on shoe or bare sole. So much of religion is an offering of the fake, of the representation rather than the reality.

  The ceiling is a vast, ornately carved wooden monstrosity, painted entirely in gold and inset with panels of oil paintings depicting key events in the saint’s life. It is as tastelessly florid and ornate as the surround to a prewar cinema screen or the proscenium arch of a music hall. Well-aimed spotlights illuminate this rococo extravaganza and tourists bend their necks and ohh and ahh at the ghastly sight as if it was a static firework display, or a presentation of the entrance to heaven itself.

  The saint’s tomb is no more restrained. It stands in a side aisle for all the world like a fairground organ. Fluted pillars, gold flecked black marble and embroidered cloth surround an evacuated glass box in which the corpse can be seen. It is a wizened thing, the face reconstituted in wax but the hands in view and looking like beachcombed driftwood. The chest appears to have collapsed under the robe draped around it. The feet are bedecked in a pair of elaborate slippers of the sort more usually seen dangling from the toes of whores in bordello windows in Amsterdam. So much glory, all for one man who was s
hrewd enough to see he was not forgotten: so much history encased in one building, in one grotesque funereal monument, in one pair of tart’s sandals.

  Yet what has the man achieved, whoever he may be? Nothing. A feast day in the calendar (December 31 or November 26, or some other date depending on the identity of the wax face and sunken chest) and a paragraph in a hagiography no one reads. A few fat old women in black dresses and sombre shawls hover like carrion crows about the altar, lighting candles perhaps for an intercession on their behalf, or punishment on a daughter for running off with an actor, a son for marrying beneath him, a husband for enjoying the poking puppets across the piazza.

  History is nothing unless you can actively shape it. Few men are afforded such an opportunity. Oppenheimer was lucky. He invented the atom bomb. Christ was lucky. He invented a religion. Mohammed was just as fortunate. He invented another religion. Karl Marx was lucky. He invented an anti-religion.

  Note this: everyone who changes history does so by destroying his fellow man. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Crusades and the spoliation of millions of primitives in the name of Christ. Pizarro massacred the Incas, missionaries corrupted the Amazon Indians and the blacks of central Africa. During the Taiping Rebellion in China more died than in both World Wars put together: the leader of the Taipings thought he was the new-come Christ. Communism has killed millions in purges, by starvation, in ethnic wars.

  To alter history, you have to kill your fellow man. Or cause them to be killed. I am no Hitler, no Stalin, no Churchill, no Johnson or Nixon, no Mao Tse-t’ung. I am no Christ, no Mohammed. Yet I am the hidden one who makes the changes possible, provides the means to the end. I too alter history.

  The wine shop is owned by an elderly dwarf who serves behind the counter standing on two wooden boxes nailed one on top of the other. He does nothing but take the order and write it on a slip of onionskin, accept payment or enter the transaction in a ledger for settlement at the end of the month and then bawl out to the dark recesses of his store. From there appears a man almost two metres high who reads the order slip and disappears, returning in due course with the bottles in boxes on a trolley. He does not smile and the dwarf is sarcastic at his every turn: the wooden boxes are chipped, the bottles are rattling, the wine is being shaken, the wheel on the trolley squeaks. I wonder every time I visit the place how long it will be before the tall one, who must spent his life crouching in the cellars, murders the dwarf, who spends his life reaching for the till on a level with his head.

  Yesterday, I went to the shop to purchase a dozen bottles of Frascati and an assortment of other wines. I drove there, through the narrow mediaeval streets, frequently sounding the horn and twisting the wheel to avoid jutting doorsteps, stubborn pedestrians and the door-mirrors of illegally parked cars, the Citroën bucking from side to side. Once at the shop, I had not long to wait. There were no other customers and the tall cellarman was behind the dwarf, restocking shelves high up by the ceiling.

  I gave my order, the dwarf screamed at his assistant as if he was a hundred metres underground, and the wine, in two boxes, quickly arrived. The assistant pushed the trolley out to my car and loaded the boxes into the trunk. I tipped him two hundred lire. As usual, he did not smile. He has, I suspect, forgotten how; but I could tell from his eyes he was pleased. Not many of the customers tip him.

  It was then, as I closed the trunk, twisted the handle and turned towards the driver’s door, I sensed him. A shadow-dweller.

  I was not unduly alarmed. This may surprise you. The fact is that I was expecting him. I have a visitor coming soon, and my visitors often send a scout ahead to spy out the lie of the land, the look of the man, of me.

  Cautiously, for I did not want to spook him, I cast glances about the street. He was four parked cars off, leaning against a Fiat 500 standing in front of a small pharmacy, his right hand on the roof. He was bending over as if speaking to the occupant. Twice he looked up, gazing along the street in both directions. This is a natural reaction with citizens of the town: standing so in a narrow street, one keeps an eye open for cars approaching over the cobbles.

  I settled myself in the driving seat, pretending to fumble for my ignition key. All the while I played my little act, I studied him in the driving mirror.

  He was in his mid-thirties with short, brown hair and a good tan, was of average height and slim, not muscular, more of an athlete. He wore sunglasses, a pair of stone-washed designer jeans, very neatly pressed with a sharp crease, a light blue shirt open at the neck and expensive buff suede shoes. It was these which gave him away and confirmed my suspicion: no one wears suedes in the summer in Italy.

  I watched him for perhaps twenty seconds, taking in every detail, then started the Citroën and drove away. No sooner was I out of my parking space than he was walking after me. This was not difficult for him for I had to drive slowly in the narrow thoroughfare. He could easily have caught me up but chose to keep his distance. At the end of the street the traffic lights changed and the thoroughfare was suddenly busy, vehicular progress invariably slow.

  A van came towards me. The driver gesticulated through the windscreen, signalling me to give him room to pass. I edged the Citroën into a doorway and halted. It was quite natural for me to look over my shoulder: I wanted to assure myself there was space for the van to get by. The shadow-dweller had stepped between two parked cars. He was looking my way, in the direction of the van which edged by the rear bumper of my vehicle.

  By chance, there was no traffic queued behind the van. I quickly backed out of the doorway and drove smartly down the street. In the door-mirror, I saw the man nip out from between the cars but the van was stuck with its door-mirror snagged on that of a blue Peugeot 309 with Rome registration and a small yellow disc in the rear window, a rental car company logo. The mirror had twisted loose. Already a crowd of onlookers was gathering for the argument. Just as the lights changed again, I turned right and was gone.

  Somewhere, someone is always waiting in the shadows, living there, patiently loitering pending the order to act, hidden like a disease biding its time to waste the muscles or poison the blood. This I accept unequivocally, just as the priest does the existence of a sinner in his congregation, the schoolmaster a miscreant in his class, or the general a coward in his army. It is a fact of the life I live, and my task is to keep a keen weather eye open, to avoid a confrontation, to give this vague presence of a man the slip.

  Once, in Washington, DC, I had to dodge a shadow-dweller. There is no need for you to know why I was in Washington. Suffice to say it was to case the stage for which I was providing one of the scene-shifters’ tools. I was a novice in those days, but fortunately he was not a thorough expert: the really accomplished shadow-dweller is one who could blend into the spines of a cactus standing solitary in the desert.

  In the heart of Washington, one of the most beautiful of America’s cities—if you ignore the black suburbs where the indispensable working classes who keep the white man’s metropolis going live—is the Mall. It is a green park of grass and trees a third of a mile wide and one and three quarters long, traversed by drives and bounded by avenues. At the east end, on its grand, arrogant little hillock, stands the US Capitol: it is like a wedding cake left on the table while the sweep cleaned the chimney. At the other end broods Lincoln in his white marble box, gruff as a judge and sternly gazing out at the corruption of the nation he vainly sought to unite. Halfway between the two stands the phallic needle of Washington’s Monument. To the north, set back behind the Ellipse, is the White House around which security is tight: too many presidents have been premature in their ride across the Potomac and up the rise to the Arlington National Cemetery.

  Tourists are not always what they seem. I have seen at least a dozen, within fifty yards of the presidential mansion, packing heat, as the Americans say. Two were women. They mingle and they watch, and they listen as they eat ice creams or popcorn, suck at Cokes or Pepsis in the summer heat. These, too, are not the experts but the rank
-and-file workers of my world, the expendables, the cannon-fodder.

  It was here that it began, in the National Museum of Natural History. I was wandering the display rooms, cursorily gazing at dinosaur skeletons, when I sensed a shadow-dweller. I did not see him, yet I knew he was about. I looked for him, in reflections in the glass cases and around the groups of school children and tourists. I could not find him.

  This was not a fancy on my part. I was, as I say, a novice, but I was already attuned to my seventh and eighth senses. The ninth and the tenth came in later years.

  I went to the museum shop area and lingered to make a few purchases. Nothing valuable; a pyrite crystal glued to a magnet, a fossilised fish from Arizona, some postcards and an American flag made of nylon with a tiny label upon it reading ‘Made in Taiwan’.

  To buy something, even a bagel or a hot dog at a street-side stall, gives one good cover from which to observe. The tail thinks the target is busy with his money or his conversation with the vendor. For those with practice, the purchase and observation can be mingled so any surreptitious glancing about is unnoticed.

  He was there. Somewhere. I still could not see him. He might have been the man in the open-neck shirt and Daks with a camera hanging from his shoulder. He might have been the young husband with the plump wife. He might have been the schoolteacher with his class or the old man tagging along behind a group of senior citizens from Oklahoma. He might have been the fattish man wearing his holiday tour company lapel badge upside-down on his navy blue wind-breaker: this could have been a signal to a compatriot shadow-dweller. He could have been the party guide. He might even have been the Japanese tourist. I just could not tell.

  I left the museum, turned right along Madison Drive, pausing at a van selling hot cookies. I could not discern him in the passers-by or those coming out of the museum, yet his reality was with me still. I bought two cookies in a waxed paper bag, walked past the National Museum of American History and across 14th Street.