After investigating the way that after an extra grappa the coat stands at the Caffè San Marco begin to resemble horns and trombones, Rossetti, not knowing how else to act, reestablished himself at his post. When Leonor next encountered him, he was as well turned out, careful and lost in his own downward gaze, as a violinist.
All right, she said, I’ll bring you to her, but only if you come in high heels, with a crown of feathers.
Be merciful, Leonor!
Rossetti, you’re not nearly as masculine as you think. Lick up a little degradation; you might enjoy it. And you know what? If you do, both Giovanna and I will see you with different eyes. Both of us. Is that an enticement or what?
He murmured: I’m in your hands.
That’s better, signor! Now come with me. I’m going to show you something. Maybe you’ve never been this way. Your elegant girls don’t live up on the hill, do they?
Because he was so submissive now (and quite amusing in his high heels), Leonor did not mind helping him, although he slightly disgusted her — for in truth she used to enjoy his arrogance. Oh, well; there was nothing for it but to be as kind to him as to any maimed animal. Sensing this, he began to find her nearly as lovely as a nude amber woman. But then with a sadistic smile she giggled: Poor Octavian! and he saw that she had led him to the last surviving gate of Octavian Caesar’s wall, which had long since became the Arco di Riccardo. High upon this relic, whose ankles and square toes were so deeply gnawed away that some people hesitated to walk through it, a cloaked and hooded little figure stretched out its sleeves, worn down to gruesomeness, its eyeless face like a peach pit, supporting or supported by spiral leafwork. The tracks and bubbles on the coarse whiteness were atmospheric pollution, no doubt.
Pinching his cheek, Leonor told him: Stay on your plinth long enough and you’ll look just like that. What’s the use?
Since he was now broken, she took him home to the atelier where she lived with her cats, her lover-man and her friend-man, explaining: Giovanna’s underneath the easel. — But when her mama led him there, down, down, turn again, skulls clenched their fangs at him and goggled their eyesockets up out of the dark ooze, beside a dead butterfly and a dead lizard lying belly up. Far away, a blonde Sphinx was gazing at him. The Sphinx’s breasts were so huge and round that they glued her to the mud.
Malvina Fini left him alone there. So did Leonor, because she was in love with her own breasts.
He saw a woman not unlike Giovanna, but with still longer, richer hair, ornamented with leaves clasped in place by a dog skull, who stood beside a dark-furred cat-man or cat-woman; they were both leaning over a tombstone, admiring a lovely corpse. Closing his eyes in loneliness, he saw parallelograms of red light. And still Giovanna made no appearance, so at length he thought to descend another flight of stairs, which led him down, down, to the mummy realm; down to where two mummies were playing a game of senet, the gameboard having been pleasingly inscribed in the top of the drawered box where the wooden pieces were kept.
Some people, including Our Lady, who eternally preserved a bright attitude, might have found these caverns almost festive, for their walls were sometimes decorated with red, black, ocher and green scenes of Apis, the sacred bull, who carries the mummies away; but Rossetti could not help but wonder: Why hasn’t he carried these mummies away? Or is this where he brings them? — He now encountered a male mummy whose shoulders were hunched and whose knees were drawn up; he was grinning at Rossetti as if in agony, and his toes resembled white marbles. Disgusted, the bronze individual turned away, to browse among the nestled half-bodies of anthropoid coffins. Where was Giovanna? Cat mummies bared their teeth at him, lurking among the little faience things found in tombs; and although Rossetti did not know it, his expression, by which I mean the expression of his soul, for his bronze face could scarcely grimace very well, became a younger version of his hosts’. He had seen dead bodies before; sometimes murders were committed in Giardino Pubblico “M. Tommasini,” even right before his plinth; and during the Occupation, the Fascists used to execute people there at night; unable to do anything else, Rossetti, who himself hoped never to be destroyed by the earth, had taken note of the dead faces like cruder mummy-masks of the Old Kingdom; now he remembered them, and the suicided Silvia disturbed him like some tiny vampiretta keening by his ear. Moreover, at first the floor-mosaics had been nearly as ornate as the brilliant red chestnuts upon the green algae and within the yellow light in the bottom of the pond in the Giardino Pubblico “M. Tommasini,” but the designs grew ever more sinister, even to him, and the unpleasant atmosphere was deepened by the unsmiling joy of the goddess Hathor, whose diorite statue he encountered far too often; for even now Rossetti preferred a woman’s shape like some drop of bitumen pulled upward until it draws in at the waist. Hunting for Giovanna, ever so lonely even among these lovely slender statuettes of nude wooden women with their arms at their sides, he faced another stiffnecked, grinning mummy, with its bony hands splayed out in the air over its crotch — a wonder they didn’t break at the wrists! — and sometimes they approached him in a hostile manner, not that they could exactly trifle with his substance: a single blow from his bronze hand and they went flying into shards and flakes! But whatever he did, he now found himself surveilled by the rigid brown muscles of a certain mummy’s face, whose strained white grin and outthrust jaw felt still more unwelcome than the long white bones breaking through the torn brown fingers, pretending to be fingernails. He uttered Giovanna’s name. The mummy pointed deeper into the darkness. When he went that way, Giulia and Lilith, those two dead cats grown gruesomely swollen, launched themselves at him from some high dark niche, clacking their teeth against his face until he brushed them aside, and they flew into the darkness wailing.
At last he prayed: Madonna, cara, help me, and I’ll offer a double handful of bronze coins to the Cathedral San Giusto!
Pitying him, Our Lady pointed, and a stream of light sped from where she stood holding her stone child up there by the Teatro Romano; it penetrated the ground and made a road for him between the replicated sceptered profiles on the sides of Egyptian sarcophagi; so he went that way, until he came into a blind passageway, and his soul’s gaze grew as huge and dark as the kohled eyes upon a certain noble mummy-woman’s sarcophagus; because Giovanna seemed to have grown taller and more rigid, if that were possible; and, still crowned but otherwise utterly nude, she pressed herself up tight against Our Lady’s seventh cousin, the cat-headed avenger goddess Sekhmet, whose faces may differ but who always holds her scepter straight between her legs and whose tubular braids of stone hair fall down to her breasts — yes, Sekhmet, the one with the solar disk on her head; and Giovanna’s bronze tongue was in this cat goddess’s mouth and her bronze hands were clasping the goddess’s temples so tightly, grinding her stone face against hers, that the stone had already begun to crack, but Sekhmet did not care because to her Giovanna appeared as gravely beautiful as the goddess Maat, weigher of truth. Once upon a time, Sekhmet had been betrayed by the fugitive flesh of a certain wooden lady-statuette with worm-eaten eyes. Now she would only settle for imperishable loves.