XI
like train tracks at night straight lines infinite networks of relays and us, usually silent, strangers who don’t open up to each other any more than we do to ourselves, obscure, obstinate, lost in the countless tracks that surround the inextricable railroad knot of the Bologna station, endless shuntings, circuits, sidings, a station divided into two equal parts where unlike Milan the gigantic size of the building is replaced by the profusion of the tracks, the verticality of columns by the number of crossties, a station that has no need of any architectural excessiveness because it is in itself excessive, the last great crossroads in Europe before the Italian cul-de-sac, everything passes through here, bottles of Nero d’Avola from the slopes of Aetna that Lowry drank in Taormina, marble from the quarries of Carrara, Fiats and Lancias meet dried vegetables here, sand, cement, oil, peperoncini from Apulia, tourists, workers, emigrants, Albanians who landed in Bari speed through here on their way to Milan, Turin or Paris: they’ve all come through Bologna, they’ve seen their train slip from one track to the other according to the shuntings, they didn’t get out to visit the basilica, they didn’t take advantage of any of the charms of a pleasant bourgeois city, suave and cultivated, the kind of city where you like to settle, the kind that offers you an early retirement and where you awaken, without anything particularly special having happened, on the threshold of death forty years later, a city like Parma, a nice place to live, a place where you die pleasantly and in a civilized way, with enough distractions so that boredom becomes the habitual caress of a mother putting her child to sleep, a city whose labyrinthine train station protects you from the uncertain world, from outside trains from the throb of the irregular from speed and from foreign places, a station I’m entering now the platform is sliding by in an orangey light, the pneumatic locks wheeze, the doors open, my neighbor a little surprised a little sleepy gets up picks up a little suitcase takes his magazine and goes out, ciao now I’m alone, wondering if someone’s going to sit down opposite me or if, when the loudspeaker announces a three-minute stop, I’ll be left to myself for ever and ever, like the little medieval wooden crucifix that somehow survived the twelfth century lost in an obscure chapel in San Petronio the magnificent basilica not far from here, solitary in the midst of flamboyant suffering Christs, this one has a little half-smile, the first time I saw it it was pouring out the rain was coming down in buckets it was the deluge and the church was full of people taking shelter from the rain, including a group of Senegalese sellers of fake Versaces looking towards the door at the rain coming down without a care in the world for what there was behind them, the splendor of the Church and the magnificence of its history were nothing to them and they were right they were selling bags to tourists and African statues
Made in Indonesia, what could this pagan temple overloaded with figurines possibly do for them aside from shelter them for a while from the storm, like me, who knows, probably I went into the temple so as not to get soaked, or out of curiosity, or out of idleness, I was in transit, I was headed for Bari to board one of those Greek tubs that crisscross the Adriatic, when the storm broke I found shelter in the cathedral facing the little polychrome wooden crucifix so simple and so contrite it looked like the fetish from Tintin’s The Broken Ear, what did I do to see it, in that dark corner where you couldn’t even turn a light on for a 500-lire coin, those light-up fixtures typical of Italian churches must pay all the electricity bills for all the churches including the Vatican, back then only about half of them worked, the length of time the light stayed on was in inverse proportion to the fame of the work of art, two minutes for a Caravaggio, five for a somber Virgin with or without Child, but my little crucifix stayed in the dark, it has the beauty of primitive things, the thick face, the almond-shaped eyes, and the craftsman I sense behind it — a cobbler, a carpenter — must have cherished this little magical being in the same way a child adores his doll, with devotion and tenderness, like the anecdote about Moses and the shepherd by Rumi the mystic from Konya: the little shepherd was singing for God, he wanted to caress Him, comb Him, wash His feet, cuddle Him, make Him beautiful, the severe bearded horned Prophet hooked on His transcendence scolded him for his disrespect before he in turn was reprimanded by the Lord Himself, let the simple worship me simply He said and I imagine the medieval sculptor scrubbing his little crucifix to paint it, singing hymns, smelling the red odor of the wood that’s more alive than marble, God at that time was everywhere, in the trees, in the cabinetmaker’s chisel, in the sky, the clouds and especially in the dense chapels dark as caves that you entered with terrified respect, where the thick incense penetrated a real curtain of smoke masking the beyond, and when you went home you were ready to have your feet nibbled by the devil in your bed, you were ready to be cured by a saint and blinded by the apparition of an angel, in San Petronio Basilica in Bologna the Italians not long ago thought they could avert one of the strangest Islamist attacks ever, an artistic one, the alleged terrorists supposedly wanted to destroy a fresco by Giovanni da Modena, painted in the early fifteenth century and representing hell according to Dante, a horrible demon devours and tortures sinners in it, and among them, in the ninth trench of the eighth circle, Mohammad the prophet of Islam, lying suffering on a rock, under Dante’s eyes, as he tells it, in I forget which canto in the Inferno, “