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I know.

Too far from God to pray.

I know.

This makes me, forever, a danger.

During a fight, you don’t have a real awareness of fighting. You protect the body because with that gone, the soul will no longer know where to live and will go away, lost.

The ghosts want my body. You don’t do anything. I try to guess your thoughts, I sense only fear, yours.

It’s not true that at a time of danger one feels fear. The only thing that you perceive is the urge to survive, against all logic.

And the throbbing of a heart.

Mine.

Let’s step down from the stage and watch.

Let’s watch the victim who defends himself like a gladiator of the past.

Let’s watch the insipid ghosts: There are too many of them for us to defend ourselves.

Let’s watch the victim on his knees, wiping up his blood.

Let’s watch the ghosts who grab him again.

Let’s watch the victim who escapes, who runs away.

Let’s watch the splinters of wood on the ground, slick with blood.

Let’s watch the sand stuck to the victim’s face.

Let’s watch the ghosts who become spattered with blood.

Let’s watch the victim falling forward.

Let’s watch the blows.

Let’s watch the victim who doesn’t move.

Let’s watch the ghosts run to the car.

Let’s watch a bloody hand resting on the roof of the car, leaving a mark.

Let’s watch the car start up, confidently, without haste.

Let’s watch the victim stretched out, motionless.

Let’s watch the car approach.

I can feel the taste of blood and sand on my lips. Like a gladiator.

Those times are over.

They never existed.

Let’s watch the car approach, without hesitation, driven by ghosts.

I have not lost consciousness.

I hear the throbbing of my heart.

I have not lost consciousness.

I am here.

I hear it.

The throbbing of my blood.

My heart.

The car. Is. Here.

The heart bursts.

Silence.

Time stops.

The car drives off, carrying the ghosts.

To Rome. The city of roads.

Eternal Rome

by Antonio Scurati

Translated by Anne Milano Appel

Colosseum

I

The spring breeze was still blowing but there were no longer nebulas of fine, powdery dust rising from the ground. The sand had become heavy. It was drenched with blood.

The entire expanse of the arena, more than 3,600 square meters, had been bloodied by hundreds of dead animals. The carcasses of forest predators — bears, tigers, leopards, panthers — lay next to the herbivores whose flesh they had been tearing at just moments before. A few hung on, in the final shudders of their death throes. Below the marble galleries, a disemboweled lioness, though soaked in her own blood, persisted in sinking her teeth into the femur of a wild ass. At the opposite end of the elliptical arena, a lion with its throat ripped open widened its mouth in a suffocated roar, searching for air and its enemy at the same time. The tragic bulk of a slaughtered elephant, already flayed by hooks, dominated the space, surrounded by heaps of ostriches with their necks broken. Nearby, a litter of baby pigs sprang from the belly of an eviscerated sow. The animal gave birth and died. The death blow from a double-edged blade had made her a mother. The piglets, slick with blood and placenta, came into the world in a cemetery at its peak, among the remains of a hecatomb of beasts. They themselves would not last long: All around them, dogs, intoxicated by the blood, howled madly — the only creatures still living besides the sow’s offspring. Along the edges of the arena, in the stands, seventy thousand human beings, intoxicated in turn, were no less mad than the dogs.

It was at that moment that the human forms appeared on the sand. Three males. One wearing a cuirass and additional armor from head to toe, and two half-naked, covered only by loincloths. After making his way through the animal carcasses to the center of the arena, the soldier gave one of the two prisoners a short sword. The armed man immediately began chasing the other. When he caught him, he disemboweled him. Then he returned the sword to his jailer. A third prisoner was brought in. The newcomer was given the sword, still bloody, and, after a short chase, slew the first killer with it. The scene was repeated numerous times, always the same. On that blood-drenched sand, victim and executioner were one and the same: a slave in a loincloth prostrated in death before thousands of satisfied spectators.

Then everything became confused. Two crosses appeared in the arena. One more than three meters high and a smaller one, both planted in the sand. A man on each cross. On the taller one, a body nailed head up was set on fire. The flesh, smeared with pitch, flared up like broomcorn. On the shorter cross, a man hanging upside down was offered to a leopard. The leopard tore off his face; swallowed it.

At that point, seeing the face of the condemned man disappear in the leopard’s maw, Donald McKenzie, a fifty-six-year-old citizen of the United States, on a pleasure trip to Rome, fainted. The man, a native of Shelbyville, Indiana, where he managed a Wal-Mart, woke up in a bed at the San Camillo hospital, in a private room, with an intravenous drip stuck in his right forearm and an electrocardiograph attached to his chest to monitor his blood pressure and heartbeat. From time to time the patient, though he was safe and far from the place he had visited in that terrible vision, still displayed arrhythmias and brief fibrillations. A few hours earlier, as he was visiting the Colosseum amid the group with whom he had traveled from the United States — and in the company of a thousand other tourists from around the world — a vivid hallucination had brought that scene of carnage to Donald McKenzie’s eyes. Though once he recovered from the fainting spell he was able to report the details of what he had seen with calm and precision, McKenzie’s fixed stare proclaimed that, from that day on, this peaceful resident of Shelbyville, in the state of Indiana, would never again believe his eyes. For him, the ancient bond of trust between the eye and the mind was broken. Irreparably.

The extent of the trauma was immediately clear to all those who had just heard McKenzie’s testimony: at his bedside were the head of the hospital’s intensive care unit, the chief of psychiatry, a senior official from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the American vice-consul, John D’Anna, accompanied by a uniformed officer of the U.S. Army, and Angelo Perosino, a young researcher of ancient history at the University of Rome. A man and a woman in dark suits and dark glasses, who had not yet identified themselves, stood apart, next to a window covered by Venetian blinds. The woman was looking out, toying with the rays of light filtering through the slits.

They all gave the impression of knowing perfectly well why they were there. All except the unfortunate Donald McKenzie and Angelo Perosino, who had been picked up a few hours before by Italian police at his tiny office at the university — “my loculus,” he called it — and taken to the hospital. Along the way they had explained only that his counsel was required. They had chosen him, he was told, not only because of his expertise on the gladiator games of Imperial Rome, but also because he spoke perfect English, having earned a Ph.D. in paleography at Yale University.