In the morning we walk, skulking on the fringes of the tourist crowds. The city is hot, packed, turbid, with a faintly volcanic scent of rocks and dust. The barging traffic releases its fumes, shimmering and nacreous, into the hazy sky. We wander in the dry gardens of the Villa Borghese, along the fine dirt paths. We visit the Trevi Fountain, hidden in its network of narrow alleyways like an idea flowering secretly in the dank network of the brain. Its white, fanciful extravagance has been found out, like the sick rose in Blake’s poem. It is crawling with people, whose clothes and bags and camera equipment look malevolent, arachnoid, against the foaming white. We visit the Roman Forum, the great decaying cavity splayed out, dissected-looking, under the sun. People clamber in the rubble with their cameras: some of them move in big, indifferent groups behind their guides, and some are in couples, quietly conferring, a faintly strained air about them, as though the whole civilized enterprise of their union is under threat from the shock of the unruly past; as though it is the future that has decayed and vanished and abandoned them here, in the ravaged Forum in their Gucci sunglasses and expensive shoes.
We climb up the Palatine Hill and then emerge out into a deserted backstreet. It is silent here, blank: now and again a person comes out as we came out, unexpectedly, as though falling from a dream. They pass us, looking around in bewilderment, and disappear. After a while we walk on, through one empty street and then another. We come out on the Capitoline Hill and enter the Palazzo Nuovo of the Capitoline Museum. There are few people inside, though the world’s richest collection of Roman art and relics is here. It is cool and quiet, eternal. Outside there is a feeling of eternity too, except that it is an eternity of repetition, of the same moment being lived over and over again, day after day, as people see the landmarks of Rome for the first time; always new people doing exactly the same thing, just as the water that runs ceaselessly over a rock in a riverbed is always new. But inside the museum it is as deep and still as a lake. We sit motionless in the window seats of the sculpture rooms on the first floor. We stare at Aphrodite and Venus and Eros, at Homer and Hercules, and they return our stares. They are so white and hard and perfect, so aloof. Their forms are so familiar that they seem like fellow creatures, yet we belong to the perishable race that runs in its endlessly renewing moment over the riverbed. The children are exhausted and dumb. Today they cannot accept the discipline of art. Their skin is brown and they wear patterned cotton scarves tied around their hair. Their feet in their sandals are dusty. We show them the sculpture of the little girl with the dove; we show them the Spinario, the boy pulling a thorn from his foot. These frozen images glimmer in the underwater light of the museum. It makes no difference that they are images of children: today they emanate only perfection and death.
We go upstairs, up and up to the roof, where there is a café. The café is crowded, but beyond its doors there is a beautiful terrace, immense and open to the sky, with all of Rome lying beneath it. There are tables and white cloths and silverware out there, and urns of flowers, and a smart canvas sun canopy, but the tables are empty. People are standing at the windows of the thronged café as though imprisoned, looking longingly out. We pass through the doors and out onto the terrace, where there is a sign. It says that people sitting at these tables must be served by a waitress. We consult the menu: the food is the same out here as in there; there is no extra charge. It is merely, it seems, a matter of procedure, or personal taste. It suggests that some people dislike being served by a waitress; but never have we wanted anything more. We sit, and presently she comes, a plump girl with beautiful black hair in a maidenly roll, and an expression of sweetness and simplicity, like Correggio’s Virgin. She takes our order; she unfurls our napkins and gently smooths the children’s scarves over their hair. Behind her, people have seen us sitting at our table and started to spill out of the café, carrying their trays. She informs them sweetly that they are not permitted to sit out here, though she doesn’t explain why. She disappears and returns again, bringing iced water and cedrata for the children, then tiny delicious sandwiches and gelati, and each time our glorious solitude is threatened she drives them back inside with not a word of explanation. We order espresso and she brings it carefully with almond biscotti. Now and again a breeze lifts from the rooftops like an ocean swell, and the flowers nod their heads. We can see a hundred domes, the dome of St. Peter’s and the broad brown Tiber, the oceanic rise and fall of hills, the strange, catastrophic tilt of human history, the field of stone like a million intricate husks of endeavor and belief. The sky is tinted pink where it meets the rust-red roofs, as though over time a little of the dye had rubbed off on its blue. The Correggio Virgin brings a little dish of wrapped chocolates for the children to the table and offers us more espressi. She gives us a mysterious rosebud smile, and turns to straighten the cloths and silver on the empty tables.
We walk through the hot bruise-colored evening down the Spanish Steps, past the Pantheon and through the Piazza Navona, where an Egyptian pharaoh stands in the gloaming, motionless in his synthetic gold sheath. He has been standing there all day, beneath the smiting sun. Now the last tourists drift by, to look at him and see if he will move: he doesn’t. They drop coins into a bowl at his feet. After a while, once darkness has fallen, his hands appear from within the sheath and he removes his mask. He steps down from the box concealed beneath the gold material. He lifts the sheath over his head. He is a small man, mustached, Middle Eastern, wearing a faded Nike T-shirt. He packs everything away, and counts the coins in his bowl.