Back in Rome people were using the word ‘heatwave’ even though it was the middle of August. I had two projects: one was to keep cool, the other not to sneeze. When I sneezed I felt like my spine was about to burst apart. Sneezing was terrifying and now that I could not do it any more I realised that I had always liked sneezing. Sneezing was one of life’s little pleasures, one that I could no longer risk — like sleeping on my side. I had to sleep on my back, I had to try to sleep on my back and, as I lay awake on my back, trying to sleep, I kept thinking what a great pleasure it was to sleep on your side, to sleep first on one side and then, while you were still asleep, to roll over on to the other side. Laura had to lie on her back too and so we lay there, on our backs, thinking about the crash which we no longer thought of as an accident but as a miraculous escape. How could it have happened, how could we have got away with it? How could we have smacked straight into a cliff wall at at least 25 mph and not banged our heads, not broken anything? We were wearing only T-shirts and shorts and yet we broke nothing: we were bruised deeply but our spleens had not ruptured and our bones were not broken. We were not paralysed, we were not cabbages, we were not dead — we just had to lie on our backs and I had to avoid sneezing. It didn’t even matter that we were confined to the apartment. All I had to do to get a feel of the neighbourhood, the quartiere, was hold my hand under the cold tap. First the water was warmish, room temperature, then cooler, then warm, as the pipes climbed down the walls into the apartment, hot as they moved over the sun-baked roof, warm again as they descended on the other side, in shadow, becoming cooler, and then cold, lovely black-cold, as they disappeared below ground, into the past.
Slowly we began to recover. In the evenings we limped to L’Obitorio for a pizza and then to our local bar, the San Calisto, where Fabrizio, the barman, had elevated surliness to the level of a comprehensive world view. With an unrelenting scowl, he abused everything he touched, yanking the lids off the gelato, gouging out the gelato, dumping it in glasses, thumping the glasses on the counter. To perform such simple actions with such aggression was no mean achievement but the truly remarkable thing was that he managed also to imbue them with a rough tenderness. His unfailing curtness — ah, how lovely it was to be on the receiving end of it! — was, likewise, a gesture of welcome. We liked to sit outside and listen to him preparing a cappuccino, hurling the saucer on to the zinc bar, tossing the spoon on to the saucer, chucking milk into the coffee, hurling the cup on to the saucer, and then throwing a hasty ‘prego’ through the clatter and noise of his colleagues. He did this even when the Calisto was empty: it was a way of generating business, like the bell of an icecream van: a call to customers: ‘The cappuccini are good here, we are always busy.’
We even got back on the moped. I had vowed never to get on a moped again but Laura, even in the dark days following the crash, conceded only that, back in Rome, she would be more careful, more alert. Now we were back in Rome she was eager, as she put it, ‘to get back in the saddle’. Laura has a good attitude to life and that, even more than her ability to pick up languages by watching soap operas, is why I love her. I, by contrast, have a very bad attitude to life, an attitude to life that began badly and is getting worse with every passing year, but it was not difficult for Laura to persuade me to get on the moped again. Laura drove, carefully, trying to avoid jolts. In Piazza Venezia we paused to admire il vigile, the white-gloved policeman who directed traffic with movements of hypnotic elegance. From his podium he conducted the traffic like a symphony: beckoning, halting, directing. It was impossible to say where one gesture ended and the next began. ‘Halt’ — clearly stated, unequivocal — merged exquisitely into ‘go’ in one flowing movement. Each gesture was executed with a flourish but this flourish — this elaboration and amplification of what was strictly necessary — added to its clarity, to its geometric precision. So it was with the architectural flourishes of Rome’s great baroque churches. The vigile’s gestures were so clear that he seemed to address cars individually, making drivers almost proud to obey his commands. The traffic responded so promptly it was easy to think he took his cue from their movements, so that his conducting became a form of dance.
From there we walked up the steps to the Campidoglio, Laura’s favourite piazza.
‘So what do you notice about this piazza?’ she asked.
‘It’s full of tourists.’
‘Anything else?’
‘They’re all wearing check trousers.’
‘The piazza.’
‘It’s a perfect square.’
‘And do you know why it’s a perfect square?’
‘No. Why?’
‘Because it’s not,’ said Laura, explaining how Michelangelo had allowed for the foreshortening of perspective by elongating the far side of the square and compressing another part. Before I had time to wonder if a more general truth could be extrapolated from the example of the Campidoglio we were off again, heading to Lungotevere to assume our place among the twenty or thirty mopeds waiting on lights, revving. At first, because of our Attic trauma, we kept to the uncrowded back of the grid and because our moped, a Piaggio Ciao, had very little acceleration we were among the last to crawl away from the lights. As the days went by and Laura became more confident she inched ahead until we were at the front of the grid. I was feeling more confident too.
‘Get ready to go on the G of green,’ I said.
‘No,’ said Laura, revving and roaring. ‘On the D of red.’
After an initial period of silent contrition I was also feeling more confident about criticising Laura’s driving. I once again started yelling out excited, nervous warnings: ‘There’s a bus ahead! Careful, there’s a taxi coming in from the side! Pot-hole! Watch out, car behind!’
‘Of course there’s a car behind, of course there’s a bus ahead,’ said Laura, unperturbed by the metal converging on us from all sides. ‘This is a city, what do you expect?’
The problem with Alonissos, Laura assured me, was that it was not a city, the roads were deserted and this is why it had been so dangerous — whereas riding a moped in Rome was so obviously filled with peril and danger that it was actually quite safe. Which was why, she went on, it was perfectly okay to get stoned and then go for a ride and see the city veer by in a series of near-misses.
It was still blazing hot. The only way to cool down was to stop for a grattachecca near Isola Tiberina. Glasses were crammed with ice-scrapings, and fruit juice poured over the ice. There was always a queue, even at three in the morning. One boy’s job was to scrape away at a vast block of ice. Laura noticed that he had an unappetising plaster on one frozen finger. It was hard to imagine how cold his hands must have been, colder than a fishmonger’s even, but that was how he scraped a living.
There was one other cool place, a building on Via Manunzio that we were drawn to, reluctantly, repeatedly. Everywhere around was boiling hot but this one building gave off an icy chill. On the door someone had written, in English, ‘Undertakers’. We went there often and then accelerated away, spooked, heading somewhere else, happy to be on the moped again.
Everything made us happy. We were getting better. We we were full of ‘the intoxication of convalescence’, full, as Nietzsche said, of ‘reawakened faith in tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, of a sudden sense and anticipation of a future, of impending adventures, of seas that were open again, of goals that were permitted again, believed again’.