XVIII
in Rome in 1598 Michelangelo Merisi called Caravaggio organizes his first decapitation: he has the head of an old horse cut off by an athletic brigand recruited in front of one of the many houses of ill repute around the mausoleum of Augustus, in his studio he attentively observes the naked killer’s muscles bulge under the weight of the sword, the curve of shoulder when he brings the blade down onto the animal’s throat, the nostrils smoking from fever, prostrate with illness the animal is condemned Caravaggio has no time to draw it of course, he studies the reflection on the metal when it penetrates the neck the spurt of black blood that soaks the warrior’s thigh and turns purple, the horse’s legs convulse, the metal returns to the charge, the savage mercenary again lifts the weapon and strikes higher up opening a new wound the horse has stopped moving the man has reached the vertebrae, the executioner is red and soaked to his waist, he bends forward to finish his work, Michelangelo Merisi watches him grasp the mane cut off the last pieces of flesh and with his left hand brandish the heavy head, effortlessly, it is dripping and its eyes are staring, Caravaggio feels nauseous, his two domestics throw buckets of water over the shuddering executioner, one can almost see his heart beating in his hairless chest, Caravaggio starts drawing, muscles, swords, gushes of blood, while the hired killer washes himself, before Merisi the invert pays him for something entirely different, a ritual that was much more reprehensible at the time than the death of a sick horse, Rome is a somber dangerous city full of daggers disfigured prostitutes cutthroats dark alleyways, Caravaggio loves this city, after his flight he won’t rest until he returns to it, even though Naples has its charm, its distress, even though you can find lovers and heads to cut off as far as Malta the prim, it’s always Rome the plebes of Rome the pomp of Rome that will attract Caravaggio the sacrificer, the man in love with bodies night and decapitation, Rome that’s coming quickly closer in the Tuscan night, tomorrow the Americans to whom Antonio the bartender is serving another Chianti might stop at Saint Louis of the French, San Luigi dei Francesi, on their way to the Piazza Navona, to see the three canvases in the Contarelli Chapel, the calling, the inspiration, and the martyrdom of St. Matthew, among the most famous works by Caravaggio, the sword of the naked man standing over the saint lying on the ground, the beauty of the angel, a few meters away in the first chapel to the left are the commemorative plaques for the French soldiers who died in Italy, the officers of free France who commanded Moroccans Tunisians Algerians Senegalese West Indians, no one looks at them, poor forgotten guys, the Moroccan troops and the Algerian goumiers, sacrificed so easily by the allied generals — withdrawn from the Italian front in July 1944 after having left 10,000 dead and missing there, they take part in the landing in Provence, will travel across all of France before crossing the Rhine in April 1945, it seems to me I’ve seen their mule trains from the window, in Italy the fear of “Moroccaning” becomes a real panic, blown out of all proportion given the facts, a few hundred violent acts by the colonial troops, they had to eat, to cheer themselves up, to earn something from war that otherwise gave nothing but pain, the French officers had the authority to send their soldiers to the firing squad at the slightest misdemeanor, without any further ado than a note sent to headquarters, there were about a hundred of these, a hundred guys shot for one reason or another, among the thousands of members of the French Expeditionary Corps that would not see the Atlas again, the Rif, Constantine, Kabylia, many of the survivors would put their military experience to the service of the FLN a few years later, some would be tortured, killed without warning or caught in ambushes facing the colonial officers who had led them to victory or to a plaque, a little marble plaque a few feet away from Caravaggio’s