Rome Noir Read online

  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

  Ostia

  Translated by Ann Goldstein

  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.