The fact remains that you’re hungry.
I stop.
Eating is a rite. The food enters the body, intriguingly prepared. The gestures recall other sensualities. The eyes allow a pleasure to surface, this time permitted, that alludes to other less licit pleasures. And it is not the mind that does all this.
Your mind does not know that you are eating this food as if it were, for me, a preview of the moment when you will eat my body.
I am silent, watching you. The November night evokes ghosts, but it is quiet. The trattoria has no indiscreet eyes: a simulation of a broken family, where everyone hates everyone but doesn’t show it. Around us, time has passed, and in a more evident way than in the city. Even the darkness is more worn and tired. Poverty wearies everyone. Those who have always been rich don’t know it. But we know it well. In our veins, as in those of Rome, plebeian blood flows.
Hearts beat at close distances. In deeper silence, I try to measure your emotion, to feel the throbbing that drives the thin blood into your hands as they fret nervously. You chew, forgetting to close your mouth. A bit of food falls out.
Rome is layered with remains.
You pick up the bit of food and put it back in your mouth. Now it is you.
It is time to go. The city that never really ends pushes us out. I can’t resist the urge. I speed along in the car. I am the virus in this city’s blood. And you accompany me, without my having truly captured you.
Via Ostiense runs parallel to the river, and like the river, glides inexorably to the sea. I do not resist the current. I go where the water of desire leads me. Curiosity takes shape, side by side with your fear. I feel it, your fear, though I do not understand the reasons for it. I will not do you any harm. How could I?
Via Ostiense and its secret ways. Something leads me where we both want to go. Of this I am certain: We both want to get there.
The place is waiting for us.
The city can be seen from outside, mirrored in the garbage that it has pushed out.
The city appears unfinished and ongoing, in houses never completed but left waiting for better times. Brackish water has rusted what remains of old industries, looming shadows in the darkness that has deepened. It is a darkness that has teeth, this one: dangerous. It devours, leaving only stripped bones that shine in the sunlight. The skeletons of unfinished buildings are also bones, which someone will hasten to cover with the flesh of bricks, and then fill in the spaces with wretched lives.
I turn off the Lungotevere onto a lesser road, a small unknown blood vessel that you and I know. Fields and piles of refuse on both sides. Rummaging there, among the garbage, we learn many things we don’t know about the city. It is a necessary rite in order to understand. As disgusting as it is, it’s the refuse that tells us the most: What people don’t want is more significant than what they keep, because we are afraid of waste and hasten to get rid of it. Over time, the refuse grows and invades and expands and breeds and is transformed. Into what, I don’t yet know. But it interests me. It interests me to rummage through the scraps of these insignificant lives.
Through the small piazza, glimpsing the absence of movement. Exploits declaimed in small, out-of-the-way bars, the shabby trick of a con man who dupes people, wondering fruitlessly why they are here. The road I am following, that suddenly seems to turn back toward the heart of Rome, is also a rotten trick. And now it’s a fraud. That’s not where we’re going.
And the heart that interests us is another.
There are soccer fields, poor simulations separated from the road by only a net. They contain the echo of a thousand little matches, a ritual that fascinates me, in practice and in memory. It is a mythological ritual, that of the game: Playing on a mangy field amid piles of garbage, we all feel like champions, and we will earn lots of money, we will be applauded, we will marry a model and bring beautiful children into the world. It is a fairy tale, a bag-lady version of the noblest myths, and it helps us. That’s what fairy tales are for: to give meaning to the throbbing of a heart that is otherwise useless.
We are lives that occupy very little space in the world, you and I. We go unnoticed. The throbbing of our heart is only important to me and to you; no one else can hear it.
Here, the city has become silent, turning into a village of illicit lives, plaster and cardboard models of a well-being that does not exist.
This is a group of houses built piece by piece, over time, with scavenged materials. Closed within them, miserable solitudes dream of recouping by the weekend a wealth and power that they will never have. They won’t find it. Rebellion is like these streets that don’t go anywhere and end at some point without really leading to any specific place. Small dead-end vessels that pour blood into the mud.
The Romans are builders of roads, but over time they’ve lost their direction and their use.
Ours is a government that builds roads, but does not know how to pursue a course sensibly.
The Romans, over time, began to build roads not to get somewhere, but just to show that they could do it. Then, without having completed the project, they ended up stopping halfway, stranding themselves in a desolation without trees, a small unpaved piazza bordered by a fence of pink and green stakes.
I’m not a femme, you say.
I breathe. Air and an intense taste.
We do what I want, you say.
I don’t take off my glasses. I never take them off.
What about the money? you ask, your eyes looking for something outside.
Ghosts. I try to hear rustling. But all I hear is the blood flowing, in your body and mine.
Because if you don’t give me the money I’m not doing anything, you explain.
I scratch around in my residual rationality, trying to return to reality.
In the meantime, you open the door and get out.
It’s not true that all places are the same at night, because you don’t visit places only with your eyes. All places have odors (this one is briny, and permeated by the smolder of cheap barbecue with traces of smoke and sweat close by — yours, I think). There are colors as well. As I too get out, following you, I find myself staring at this fence of pink and green stakes. I am distracted.
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.