Calcata looked the same. In all likelihood it had not changed in a few hundred years. Once abandoned, the small town had been repopulated several decades ago by hippies and was now turning into a historical arts center, with medieval summer houses for rich Romans, artists, or visiting lovers, art galleries, and a handful of tiny country restaurants. The whole town, whose population still didn’t number more than nine hundred people normally, was built on a hilltop of volcanic rock.
He parked the rented blue Fiat outside the ramparts and walked up the stone street into the town, past the arches and fortifications.
The small cottage where they had frozen and spent thirty-six hours all that time ago was still there. He wondered what sort of couple was now inside in that unforgettable bedroom you could only access through a shaky wooden ladder (aaahhhh, the vision of her climbing those stairs, stark naked, his eyes looking straight at the voluptuous and bouncing flesh of her ass as he ascended behind her, his cock hard and ready, his mind aglow with tenderness and desire...).
He walked by the steep stone steps to his forgotten paradise and ventured past narrow alleys, closed craft shops, and clothes hanging loose from windows until he reached the narrow promontory that dominated the valley below.
The view was quite beautiful, rugged, untamed. In the distance, forests dominated the landscape, but below the damaged stone walls protecting this side of Calcata was a giant lunar expanse of rocks.
He sighed.
Best remember the good times.
When she smiled at him and her eyes expressed a million things unsaid.
He pulled that silly gun from the plastic bag and hurled it into the void. It fell in a large arc and it felt like almost a minute before he saw it actually hit the ground some five hundred meters below. It didn’t go off. He had left the safety catch on. No need to draw attention to himself, even though there didn’t appear to be a soul for a mile around.
He closed his eyes.
My sweetie, she would call him.
He took a deep breath.
My wild gypsy, he would often say to her.
He pulled his left leg over the wall, raised himself energetically so that he now stood on the edge of the precipice.
Looked down a final time.
Those fierce and distant rocks should do the job, he reckoned.
And jumped.
Eaten Alive
by Evelina Santangelo
Translated by Anne Milano Appel
Via Ascoli Piceno
Springtime in Rome, a dawn populated with chattering birds. An impalpable veil of smog that slowly dissipates, as though steadily absorbed by the great sponge of the sun in its methodical climb toward the vault of the sky. White wisps of clouds scattered here and there in the blue that watches over the peaceful city and its outlying areas, still sunk in a stubborn Sunday morning slumber, broken by the din of garbage trucks, the rumble of a bus. “The 105 or the 81,” Quirino murmurs, rinsing the coffee cup under the faucet and placing it on the drain board. He fills a glass, takes some big sips. “Ah, the taste of Rome’s cool waters!” With a mechanical gesture he tightens the tie of his light woolen blue-and-white striped robe and gazes at the beautiful, mutilated structure of the Colosseum, licked by the first rays of the sun: the “big windows,” as he calls them, that run along the circular walls. “Solid,” he murmurs, satisfied, the tip of his index finger following the play of depressions and reliefs carved out of the fake marble with industrial precision, imitating with the touch of a master the irregularities of the stone worn away by time. “Centuries,” Quirino murmurs, drawing himself up and resting the palm of his hand on the edge of the credenza. He slips his bare feet into his slippers, and goes over to the window that looks out on the street, a modest strip closed to cars and flanked by low houses: The cables of television antennae hang down along the façades from the rooftops like improbable, permanent festoons, working their way somehow or other into window frames or cracks in the walls below the sills. “Television... everyone has a television...” He lowers his eyes to the street littered with beer bottles and small shapeless piles of trash. A cat emerges silently from an empty dumpster still sunk in shadow, and quietly licks a paw.
The stillness is broken only by the monotonous swishing of a street sweeper’s broom. The cat turns to watch the almost phosphorescent green plastic bristles, then resumes licking, indifferent to the other paw. It starts suddenly when it sees the broom rise — “Drunken kids!” — and angrily thump the dumpster’s grimy metal, barely missing its tail. “Drunken kids,” the street sweeper mutters again, wiping his forehead with his arm, his hands stuffed into enormous work gloves.
Quirino leans out, nods to him. “Got a bee up your butt tonight?” he says, relishing those first words of conversation. “Nice morning,” he adds, throwing his arms wide in a gesture that embraces heaven and earth.
“Nice morning, nice morning...” the other man repeats, shaking his head and crouching down on the sidewalk to retrieve a bottle stuck between the wheels of the dumpster. He raises it toward the window, dangling it between the black fingers of his bulky gloves. “They’ve trashed the neighborhood, those sons of bitches,” he says, waving the bottle in the air and tossing it in the bag. “You should see the garbage in front of that shitty store, where those deadbeat godless immigrants make money selling beer to young kids until 3 in the morning... A bottle factory? A piss factory!” he adds. He shrugs helplessly, looks around. “Filth everywhere... on the ground, on the walls...” He points to the layers of mimeographed posters pasted on the façades. “A person has his own problems, no place to live... rents here being what they are now... and there, they go and put stuff all over the walls... What a life it would be without rent... What a life it would be without rent...” he reads, stressing each word. “On all the walls... Some like it hot, some like it cold. And they think they’re fascists... social fascists... and there, they go and print these and stick them on the walls! And they still have revolution in their heads... And they go printing that crap about their laboratories for revolution... and there... they go and stick their proletarian solidarity on the walls. Those spoiled brats! To them, going to live in Pigneto seems revolutionary... with money, of course! Not to mention those other... beauties... Chinese, Bengalis, Pakistanis, Indians, Senegalese. Only they know what the hell they are... They come to our country to bust our balls... with their posters... because, what do I know, they have their holidays and they want to celebrate them however and wherever they say. They have houses like this... and they want them like that... Do we have houses like that? Oh, do we? Eight hundred euros a month, yours truly, in Torpignattara...” He holds three black fingers up against the sky. “Eight hundred!” he repeats. “So much for rent control...”
Quirino, with a sudden feeling of embarrassment, puts on a contrite expression. “That’s how it is,” he says, “with these new euros...”
“That’s how it is? The hell it is! Yesterday... yesterday, at the corner of Tor Pignattara, right next to my house... flyers everywhere. And why? Because these kids, immigrant sons of bitches, want to play cricket on Sunday... at Villa de Santis, in the park... and our kids follow right along, now they, too, want to play crick-e-crock... And what does it mean, huh, do you know what We want to play crick-e-crock means?”