Rome Noir Read online

  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

  Colosseum

  Translated by Anne Milano Appel

  I

  The spring breeze was still blowing but there were no longer nebulas of fine, powdery dust rising from the ground. The sand had become heavy. It was drenched with blood.

  The entire expanse of the arena, more than 3,600 square meters, had been bloodied by hundreds of dead animals. The carcasses of forest predators—bears, tigers, leopards, panthers—lay next to the herbivores whose flesh they had been tearing at just moments before. A few hung on, in the final shudders of their death throes. Below the marble galleries, a disemboweled lioness, though soaked in her own blood, persisted in sinking her teeth into the femur of a wild ass. At the opposite end of the elliptical arena, a lion with its throat ripped open widened its mouth in a suffocated roar, searching for air and its enemy at the same time. The tragic bulk of a slaughtered elephant, already flayed by hooks, dominated the space, surrounded by heaps of ostriches with their necks broken. Nearby, a litter of baby pigs sprang from the belly of an eviscerated sow. The animal gave birth and died. The death blow from a double-edged blade had made her a mother. The piglets, slick with blood and placenta, came into the world in a cemetery at its peak, among the remains of a hecatomb of beasts. They themselves would not last long: All around them, dogs, intoxicated by the blood, howled madly—the only creatures still living besides the sow’s offspring. Along the edges of the arena, in the stands, seventy thousand human beings, intoxicated in turn, were no less mad than the dogs.

  It was at that moment that the human forms appeared on the sand. Three males. One wearing a cuirass and additional armor from head to toe, and two half-naked, covered only by loincloths. After making his way through the animal carcasses to the center of the arena, the soldier gave one of the two prisoners a short sword. The armed man immediately began chasing the other. When he caught him, he disemboweled him. Then he returned the sword to his jailer. A third prisoner was brought in. The newcomer was given the sword, still bloody, and, after a short chase, slew the first killer with it. The scene was repeated numerous times, always the same. On that blood-drenched sand, victim and executioner were one and the same: a slave in a loincloth prostrated in death before thousands of satisfied spectators.

  Then everything became confused. Two crosses appeared in the arena. One more than three meters high and a smaller one, both planted in the sand. A man on each cross. On the taller one, a body nailed head up was set on fire. The flesh, smeared with pitch, flared up like broomcorn. On the shorter cross, a man hanging upside down was offered to a leopard. The leopard tore off his face; swallowed it.

  At that point, seeing the face of the condemned man disappear in the leopard’s maw, Donald McKenzie, a fifty-six-year-old citizen of the United States, on a pleasure trip to Rome, fainted. The man, a native of Shelbyville, Indiana, where he managed a Wal-Mart, woke up in a bed at the San Camillo hospital, in a private room, with an intravenous drip stuck in his right forearm and an electrocardiograph attached to his chest to monitor his blood pressure and heartbeat. From time to time the patient, though he was safe and far from the place he had visited in that terrible vision, still displayed arrhythmias and brief fibrillations. A few hours earlier, as he was visiting the Colosseum amid the group with whom he had traveled from the United States—and in the company of a thousand other tourists from around the world—a vivid hallucination had brought that scene of carnage to Donald McKenzie’s eyes. Though once he recovered from the fainting spell he was able to report the details of what he had seen with calm and precision, McKenzie’s fixed stare proclaimed that, from that day on, this peaceful resident of Shelbyville, in the state of Indiana, would never again believe his eyes. For him, the ancient bond of trust between the eye and the mind was broken. Irreparably.

  The extent of the trauma was immediately clear to all those who had just heard McKenzie’s testimony: at his bedside were the head of the hospital’s intensive care unit, the chief of psychiatry, a senior official from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the American vice-consul, John D’Anna, accompanied by a uniformed officer of the U.S. Army, and Angelo Perosino, a young researcher of ancient history at the University of Rome. A
man and a woman in dark suits and dark glasses, who had not yet identified themselves, stood apart, next to a window covered by Venetian blinds. The woman was looking out, toying with the rays of light filtering through the slits.

  They all gave the impression of knowing perfectly well why they were there. All except the unfortunate Donald McKenzie and Angelo Perosino, who had been picked up a few hours before by Italian police at his tiny office at the university—“my loculus,” he called it—and taken to the hospital. Along the way they had explained only that his counsel was required. They had chosen him, he was told, not only because of his expertise on the gladiator games of Imperial Rome, but also because he spoke perfect English, having earned a Ph.D. in paleography at Yale University.

  After hearing the gruesome story, Perosino, frightened by the American’s delirium and close to an attack of claustrophobia, felt a nostalgic yearning for the amber light that at this moment would be spreading over the hills of Rome, heralding evening. So the researcher gently took one of the two doctors by the arm. He got what he was looking for.

  “Professor Perosino, you are here because our friends at the American embassy suspect that some psychically unstable subjects,” the psychiatric chief explained in Italian, “strongly affected by the ruins of the Colosseum and overcome by the intense heat, may have developed hallucinatory visions of scenes that, based on what they were told by the guides, they imagine took place in antiquity on the sand of the arena.”

  “Why do you say ‘subjects,’ doctor?” Perosino replied, irritated by the absurdity of the situation. “There’s only one patient that I can see.”

  “This is not the first case,” the doctor whispered.

  “English, please!” The demand came from the far end of the room, from one of the two individuals in dark suits: the woman.

  “Yes, Professor Perosino, perhaps it is only fair for you to know that this has also happened to others in recent weeks. Persons very different in age, social class, and profession, who have never met one another.” Speaking now, in a soft, refined English, was Vice-Consul D’Anna. “In this case, however, there is something that doesn’t add up. And it is for this reason that we would like your advice, which will be well remunerated, I assure you.”

  Perosino studied the two figures at the back of the room, then gestured for D’Anna to continue.

  “What we cannot explain, apart from the nature of these visions, is their content. The atrocities described by Mr. McKenzie do not at all resemble the gladiator matches…”

  Angelo Perosino shook his head, visibly annoyed by the man’s ignorance. “You see, sir, on any given day of the spectacles, in addition to the actual skirmishes between gladiators that took place in the afternoon, the Colosseum presented animal hunting and fighting during the morning program. The beasts were brought to Rome from every corner of the Empire and, sometimes in the space of a few hours, hundreds of them were exterminated. Furthermore, the scenes of torture described at the end of the story recall the executions of murderers, fugitive slaves, Christians—spectacles that filled the interval between the morning and afternoon programs. During the break between the venationes—the animal hunts—and the gladiator duels, while the populace feasted in the stands and the well-to-do left to go eat in taverns, some were slaughtered. Just like that, to pass the time.”

  “Are you telling us, then, that the hallucination experienced by Donald McKenzie corresponds to the scientific knowledge we have in our possession about what took place in the Colosseum in the days of ancient Rome?”

  “Absolutely,” Perosino decreed, hoping to be able to regain his freedom this way. “A philologically correct hallucination, I would say.”

  As Angelo Perosino was escorted out, he noticed that the two individuals in dark suits were whispering animatedly to one another. They appeared to be in open disagreement about a matter of utmost importance. The man was arguing with barely contained passion in favor of some hypothesis, while the woman responded with cold, decisive gestures of denial. The researcher managed to catch only a few words, spoken loudly by the man, who was obviously vexed by the woman’s dissent.

  “…remote viewing … remote viewing,” he nearly shouted at her, taking off his dark glasses for the first time.

  II

  Angelo Perosino had been wandering for hours among the ruins of the Colosseum along with the two mysterious individuals who had introduced themselves to him as Agent Stone and Agent Miller, obviously fake names. A telling incident had reinforced the young scholar’s conviction that they were agents of the CIA. After a brief huddle with the Italian police stationed around the metal detector at the entrance to the Colosseum, the weapons that both Miller and Stone carried in underarm holsters had been returned to them. And so Perosino found himself acting as guide to two armed agents in what remained of the largest theater of antiquity, a structure built with the blood of tens of thousands of slaves on two imaginary axes of 188 and 156 meters, for an overall perimeter of 527 meters.

  As they wandered among crowds of tourists in shorts and bogus Roman centurions in cheap costumes posing for pricey souvenir photos, Perosino could not help mentally reviewing the information about “remote viewing” that he had acquired on the Internet. A brief search had been enough to discover that the term referred to a variety of techniques and protocols used to produce and control extrasensory perceptions. In remote-viewing phenomena, it was believed that a “viewer” could acquire multisensory information on an object situated anywhere in space and time without having previous knowledge of it. The pseudo-scientific explanations for these parapsychological phenomena referred to the alleged ability of the individual consciousness to connect to a supposed “matrix,” a field of pure information, which, like the realm of the mythical ether, is said to be found beyond the illusory space-time continuum that we conventionally call “reality.” A conceptually elaborate form of clairvoyance, whose scant credibility had, however, been reinforced by a top secret project financed by the American government during the Cold War years. The project, initially launched in the early 1970s with the name Stargate, under the supervision of the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), was intended as a response to experiments that had been performed by the Soviets with clairvoyants, psychokinetics, telepathics, and child prodigies in support of espionage and counter-espionage activities and security systems associated with them. Later, the project passed to the control of the CIA, under the name SCANATE, and then, in the mid-’90s, was shut down. This according to official versions. But on the many websites devoted to these topics, fans of parapsychology claimed that, following the attacks of September 11, research in the United States had resumed, with even more advanced and more covert protocols and projects.

  Angelo Perosino was almost run over by a small horde of ecstatic Japanese tourists on a photographic safari. The more the researcher contemplated the reasons he found himself at the Colosseum on a muggy August day, the more they seemed like a load of nonsense. Instinctively, he turned his back to the arena and directed his gaze toward the exit. A hand gently harpooned his right forearm. Agent Miller, beautiful and icy as always in her mannish Armani suit, was staring straight ahead at the stands on the other side of the arena.

  Surrounded by a small group of fellow travelers who were making useless attempts to reassure him, a man of sturdy build, apparently terrified, was shouting as if possessed and pointing to a spot in the middle of the arena where, two thousand years earlier, gladiators had duelled to their deaths. In that spot, only a mound of dusty soil parched by the August sun could now be seen.

  “Iu-gu-la! Iu-gu-la! Iu-gu-la!”

  Seventy thousand people were shouting in unison, chanting the invocation with a hypnotic three-syllable rhythm. As if with one voice, seventy thousand men, women, old people, and children, of all social classes, turned to the Emperor’s dais and let the guttural sounds rise up in that single voice. A hoarse voice. The stands of the Colosseum had been sprayed with a mixture o
f water and wine spiced with aromatic essences, and the sweet fragrance of saffron was married to the acrid odors of sweat and blood.

  In the center of the arena, a man kneeling in utter despair awaited death, his torso bare, his muscular arms hanging loosely at his sides, his head thrown back to offer up his throat, eyes closed and mouth gaping. Until just a few seconds earlier, the man had fought vigorously. He had challenged, attacked, and threatened his adversary. He had even mocked him, displaying his genitals with the hand that gripped the sword. Now he was offering the second man his throat. He knelt before him like an object discarded in the dust.

  After kicking aside the double-edged sword, the long rectangular shield, and the broad-visored helmet taken from the defeated man, the victor stood towering over him. He was bare-chested as well, and wore leg pads up to his thighs to protect his lower limbs; in his left hand he gripped a small round shield; in his right, a short, curved sword, like a dagger. His features were hidden by a helmet that covered his entire face, leaving only two small openings for the eyes. The victor raised the blade of the curved dagger to within a few inches of his own nose, as if a bestial myopia drove him to smell the adversary’s blood on the weapon that would kill him. The crowd worshipped him. He reciprocated, hardening into the unmoving madness of a stone idol.

  “Iu-gu-la! Iu-gu-la! Iu-gu-la!”

  Everything remained fixed for a few interminable seconds—the despairing defeated man, the exalted victor, the ululating public—a moment suspended in time as in a horrific infinity. Then, suddenly, that picture of unyielding savagery came to life again. The Emperor rose from his throne and held his arms out before him as if to embrace the entire amphitheater. A silence fell. Absolute. The most powerful man on earth, who could dispose of anyone in that arena however he wished, turned to the people, taking their views into consideration. At that moment, even the lowest of the excrement-befouled plebeians could express an opinion. The decision depended on him as well. He, too, was called upon to decide life or death. The Emperor radiated divine power, shedding it over everyone in the Colosseum. The people would be part of the spectacle, would descend into the arena and decide the match.