XV
airbrakes shrill cries obscure pain in my ears intense light the train stops Santa Maria Novella Saint Mary the New the Florentine train station the sign is blue the letters white I straighten up stretch, travelers bustle about the platform women men, men women it must be cold here too everyone’s bundled up in heavy coats some ladies have furs angora blue lynx chinchillas real or fake in Venice there were many furriers for the incredible quantity of stuck-up old cows the city contains the most freezing city in the Mediterranean caressed by Siberian winds coming in from the Pannonian Plain, as frigid as Constantinople and that’s cold, stores with their display windows overflowing with mink and golden fox, shops equipped with immense refrigerators to preserve all these pelts through the summer, let’s hope for the furriers’ sake that global warming is the prelude to an Ice Age, the diversion of the Gulf Stream will make the Rhone freeze in winter we’ll all have astrakhan shapkas on our heads we’ll be able to skate to Ajaccio long-distance Valencia Majorca in a sled the Moroccans will invade Spain on horseback and the apes on the Rock of Gibraltar will finally die of cold, dirty animals apes, thieving and aggressive, so human they won’t hesitate to bite the hand that feeds them noisy lewd exhibitionist masturbators, maybe they’ll adapt to the new climate conditions, the simians, orangutans with long white fur will make their appearance on the new ice floes they’ll be hunted for their skins it will be a real pleasure, a real end-of-the-world pleasure, the last man chasing the last monkey on an ice shelf floating in the middle of the Atlantic and so long, farewell, end of the hominid primates, on the platform the ladies in furs watch their husbands carry the luggage, the couple next to me hasn’t budged, so they’re going to Rome, four people enter our car, a woman in her sixties sits down opposite me on the seat vacated in Bologna by the Pronto reader, she doesn’t have a mink but a black wool coat that she has folded to store above her seat, a rather broad but harmonious face, hair almost white, eyes dark, a pearl necklace above a red cardigan upper-middle-class the statisticians or polling institutes would say, she searches through her handbag to get a book out, she hasn’t favored me with a look, the train will start up again soon, soon it will start up again for the great descent nonstop to the Termini, I remember a scene in Amici Miei, the film by Monicelli with Tognazzi and Noiret, on this same platform, the five friends with their virile noisy friendship play a hysterical game, they wait for a train to leave and give the passengers leaning out the windows a resounding smack in the face, the men and especially the women, and this sport makes them die laughing, so much that one of the characters says this magnificent phrase,
how happy we are with each other, how happy, it’s too bad we’re not gay, with Vlaho and Andi we could have uttered the same phrase with the same conclusion we were happy together in Osijek on our jaunt to Trieste in Mostar in Vitez we were happy strangely happy war is a sport like any other in the end you have to choose a side be a victim or a killer there is no alternative you have to be on one end or the other of the rifle you have no choice ever or at least almost never, we’re leaving in the other direction, like Santa Lucia in Venice or Termini in Rome Santa Maria Novella is a dead-end, we start up again, now I’m facing my destination, Rome is in front of me, Florence streams past, noble Florence scattered with cupolas where they blithely tortured Savonarola and Machiavelli, torture for the pleasure of it strappado water the thumb-screw and flaying, the politician-monk was too virtuous, Savonarola the austere forbade whores books pleasures drink games which especially annoyed Pope Alexander VI Borgia the fornicator from Xàtiva with his countless descendants, ah those were the days, today the Polish pontiff trembling immortal and infallible has just finished his speech on the Piazza di Spagna, I doubt he has children, I doubt it, my neighbors the crossword-loving musicians are also talking about Florence, I hear Firenze Firenze one of the few Italian words I know, in my Venetian solitude I didn’t learn much of the language of Dante the hook-nosed eschatologist, Ghassan and I spoke French, Marianne too of course, in my long solitary wanderings as a depressed warrior I didn’t talk with anyone, aside from asking for a red or white wine according to my mood at the time, ombra rossa or bianca, a red or white shadow, the name the Venetians give the little glass of wine you drink from five o’clock onwards, I don’t know the explanation for this pretty poetic expression, go have a shadow, as opposed to going to take some sun I suppose at the time I abused the shadow and night in solitude, after burning my uniforms and trying to forget Andi Vlaho Croatia Bosnia bodies wounds the smell of death I was in a pointless airlock between two worlds, in a city without a city, without cars, without noise, veined with dark water traveled by tourists eaten away by the history of its greatness, the Republic of the Lion with a thousand bars, in Morea in Cyprus in Rhodes the Mediterranean East was Venetian, the galleys and galleasses of the doges ruled over the seas — when I visited the Arsenale with Ghassan, telling him about the Battle of Lepanto facing the immensity of the harbor basins, in front of the shapes of the docks and piers, I understood the infinite power of La Serenissima, a stone lion stolen from Rhodes good-naturedly guarded the port of the greatest arsenal in the Mediterranean, pax tibi Marce evangelista meus, peace be with you, Mark my Evangelist, that’s what an angel said to Saint Mark when he was sleeping in a boat on the lagoon, before crossing the Mediterranean and dying near Alexandria, in a place called Bucculi, the house of the bullock driver, where he had built a church, the angry pagans martyred him without delay, the white-bearded saint, they tied him up and dragged him to death behind a cart over broken cobblestones singing let’s bring this steer back to his stable, in Beirut during the civil war they liked this torture very much, a number of prisoners died attached with barbed wire to a Jeep crossing the city at top speed, torn to bits scraped bare burned by the asphalt asphyxiated their limbs dislocated like the Evangelist in Alexandria and Isadora Duncan the scandalous in Nice, in 828 the Venetians stole Mark’s relics from the Egyptians to offer him a final resting-place in their city, in that Byzantine basilica with the five domes, with the gold-encrusted nave the only church in the world where you can reply et cum spiritu tuo with your feet in the water, Saint Mark’s the floodable — the Zone is rainy, Zeus often drowns cities in terrifying downpours, Beirut Alexandria Venice Florence and Valencia are regularly submerged, and even once in Libya desert of deserts in Cyrene the sparkling I witnessed an apocalyptic storm, divine punishment rained down on the ruins and the few tourists who had dared to come to the land of Qaddafi the sublime madman, they had sent me to negotiate the purchase of highly important information on Arab Islamist activities, the Libyan agencies were unbeatable on this subject and Qaddafi sold his entire store of it in exchange for reintegration into the league of nations, he gave everything he knew about the activists he had more or less supported, closely or remotely, everyone in the shadows rejoiced at the Libyan information, the British, the Italians, the Spaniards, Lebihan the bald lover of mollusks also rubbed his hands, a good operation, he said “go to Libya, you like to travel, it’s probably interesting” he didn’t believe a word of it obviously, a country where there wasn’t even a bicycle race worthy of the name and where you had to eat atrociously spicy horrors, I agreed especially in order to see Cyrene and Ghebel Akhdar the Green Mountain country of Omar Al Mokhtar who had caused the Italians no end of trouble before dying at the end of a rope in 1931, the white-bearded sheikh fought against the soldiers of the new Rome almost barehanded, in that piece of desert Italy had taken from the Ottomans in 1911—Rodolfo Graziani in charge of organizing the repression copied the methods of the British in South Africa and the Spanish in Cuba, he emptied Cyrenaica of its inhabitants, sending 20,000 or 30,000 Libyans into camps, on foot across the desert without supplies, sure of decimating them, he was