They go on this way a little longer, one step after the other, she retreating and he advancing slowly.
She glances back and notices that she’s getting close to a billboard, the ad pasted to it promoting the wine of the Castelli, a wine that’s good for your blood.
He sees it too.
Blood.
The highway, in the distance, begins to grow light.
On the slight incline the headlights of a truck appear, bright and powerful.
I’ve done everything for you, forever, I can’t understand what I could have done wrong this time. Every time! he shouts.
She stumbles and ends up on the ground, her hands reaching forward, her voice strangled by fear.
Listen, I can’t do it, I didn’t think you would...
The lights are getting closer, and he stops.
This is the scene of the moment when it’s all over.
She is sitting.
He is standing.
The car is far away.
The car is low.
God is distracted because the car is low.
The truck is arriving swiftly.
The truck proceeds toward them, facing him. He takes a step forward.
She cries out desperately.
He takes a step sideways.
The truck hits him directly.
He knows he has always loved her.
She didn’t know that another she hadn’t loved him.
To the police, while the emergency workers scoop up the last shreds of white shirt off the asphalt, she says absently that it was the first time.
That he had paid in advance.
That she had never seen him before.
That he had told her what to do, how and when.
That he had told her what to say.
A policeman gives her his wallet.
Inside is a photograph, there she is.
Another she.
A she who didn’t love him.
Caput Mundi
by Giuseppe Genna
Translated by Anne Milano Appel
Montecitorio
Rome, early, brisk May morning. The sky is clear and the air surprisingly chilly. Tension converges in the frigid sunshine, an unperceived tension. Humans, tourists and natives, walk along Via del Corso in dense throngs, their clothing vivid, smiling, thinking about what they have to do, where they have to go, the office, monuments to visit: everyday banalities. What is commonly called happiness. What others more warily call serenity — or indifference. Everyday life: banal, feverish, cheerful, Roman...
Police cars are packed tighter than usual around Montecitorio. Palazzo Montecitorio, seat of the Chamber of Deputies: the political heart of the nation. The old, yellowish Baroque building, which the genius Bernini distilled from an incubus of the imagination, twisting and bending the forms in dizzying abysses, complicating the internal labyrinths, widening the staircases, violating the door of the guarded entrance that faces the hunchbacked piazza. Here there are soldiers everywhere. And near the hotel to the left of the Chamber’s façade as well. This is the hotel where uniforms of American pilots were stolen in 2001, along with their badges: the access source for the terrorists who brought about September 11. It came out in subsequent investigations: a robbery in Rome for the attack in New York.
A butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing can become a tornado in New York, according to fractal theory. A banal theory, a serene butterfly. Don’t trust butterflies, or serene banality.
Montecitorio surrounded by soldiers: Inside, there’s no one. The sessions are adjourned.
Evidently, not all of the sessions are adjourned. The Premier, pale, rushes out of the smaller side door, not intended for television cameras, which for that matter are absent. What is he leaving behind on a chilly, luminous day of adjournment like this one? A rare chat with some listless deputies in the Transatlantico, the excessively Baroque hallway called “dei passi perduti,” the corridor of “lost footsteps,” where the Republic’s intrigues, both transparent and obscure, are hatched.
Outside, the chill does not seem to ease up. The Italian flag, limp in the cold air, hangs over the main door of Montecitorio along with the blue European one: bright in a cloudless sky.
In the narrow streets around Montecitorio: centuries-old dampness, the reek of cat piss, of animal piss. Gaps in the bricks, irregularly set. Some pigeons hunker in the cracks of the wall to protect themselves against the cold: They coo. Cats cross paths with one another. People walk along, some toward the Pantheon.
Via Sant’Andrea delle Fratte. Two hundred meters from Montecitorio as the crow flies.
The surreal atmosphere of this cold spell. An imperceptible tension glances off the walls encrusted with nineteenth-century plaster, the old niches of the masters, the rust-brown paint of the closely set buildings. Via Sant’Andrea delle Fratte: its strange, not-quite-right opening. Abnormal, narrow, difficult, yet expansive, forcing all eyes to the church, which dominates the street and the opening. The church’s façade is a flat barrier, peculiar, it seems to bear down on the back of the skull. It is naked, pure masonry, the color of tufa almost. A further work of the architect Bernini, a bell tower that impresses tourists, though Romans have grown accustomed to the sight of that anomaly. The bell tower is indescribable: It is a small temple, joined to the ground by an unreal masonry volute. The main entry of the church is a door: a plain door. There is no rose window; there is just a window.
In front of the entrance: armored cars and a doubled guard. The Italian Premier is very Catholic and prays here every day.
Now he is inside.
Inside the Church of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte there is an explosion of gold. Periodically, the Santissimo, the consecrated Host of the body of Christ, is exposed, and for this reason one must kneel upon entering. It is a scene that is enthralling for tourists, customary for Romans. Only a few faithful come here. Right now there are four of them. They are praying to the monstrosity of the Santissimo, the walled altar, the worked gold. The small shrine in which the body of Christ is exposed to view: a masterpiece of the goldsmith’s art and faith. Wherever you are, inside the church, you see the Santissimo, you look at Christ. The church is very small, with one nave. There are four rows of benches for the faithful, very close together.
The Premier is kneeling down in his dark overcoat, his over-sized glasses smudged with fingerprints and dust, his head bent, his eyes shut tight, his hands joined at his breast.
This is the part that makes your head spin.
A small gold almond appears.
The Madonna appeared here in Rome in 1820, and two Jewish bankers of the Ratisbonne family were instantly converted.
The small gold almond quivers and expands.
It appears to stream forth from the altar, it instantly inflames the altar’s gold like an ultra-body, a blazing spirit.
It is the void exploding.
The void explodes and grows larger, the flame is hungry for air, it mushrooms.
The Premier of Italy only has time to be astounded, to raise his bent head.
The church collapses in a roar.
The bodyguards are killed in the blast.
When the attaché, former FEMA, of the United States third intelligence service in Rome, the real secret agency, arrives at the scene of the devastation, the disaster has not been reconstructed: Italians, those clever people, spaghetti-eaters good for patting him on the head or endlessly running around behind the bench of the Court of New York, in perpetual trials against the Mafia. Clever guys good for Scorsese. The attaché who arrives at the “scene of the slaughter” (the dirge, repeated over and over, audible above the dense ring of reporters droning on like automatons in front of their cameramen) has the advantage of language: He is a fourth-generation macaronic and knows how to listen, knows how to speak Italian, and knows what the Italians are hiding under this language that is the oldest and most ambiguous modern tongue in the world, intact for eight hundred years, from Dante’s Inferno through to today.