while the driver collected the money.
For hours, the orange man cruised around; until evening I would hear his horn, his bell, and the tireless announcements from his loudspeaker. He frequently quarreled with other drivers, because he moved forward slowly and longingly kept watch for customers, recklessly grazing the corners of houses and parked cars in the narrow lanes. He took lunch in the graveyard. He would stop in a pull-out niche directly in front of the main gate, where the sun, if it came out, would shine into his cart. Once I even saw him there with his mouth half-open, asleep, his cheek pressed to the window. He was the only one in the region who drove an old-fashioned three-wheeled scooter. Perhaps it was part of the image he had to embody as a Sicilian orange merchant, and the carts, coated in the bitter aroma of oranges, spent summers in a long sleep in the warehouses, then empty of all fruit and hot as embers.
Several times a traveling gas fitter came around, offering his services. He only surfaced on Sundays and would perform any job that involved cucine a gas; he always called out gásse as if twirling it around his tongue, giving it two syllables, emphasizing the first and following it with a small yet distinct swerve. Lavoro subito e immediatamente!, he would call into his loudspeaker, and between announcements he played a kind of marching music, certainly meant to startle potential customers and lend gravity to his question: Is your cucina a gásse in need of repair? Are you certain? Have you recently smelled gásse? He would add this last sentence to his repertoire only later, likely only when not a single housewife had hurried out into the street, ringing her hands, to save lunch. The gas fitter was also out all day. Perhaps he made a detour to Bellegra or Roiate—a small mountain village inhabited exclusively by old men—but he never stayed away for longer than an hour. Depending on the route and weather conditions, his announcements and marching music sounded either clear or muffled, and on the backside of Olevano, on the street between two partially inhabited developments, they reverberated from the hillsides; tone and echo tumbled, overlapped, robbing the words of all comprehensibility, so that only the word for gas hung in the air. Spring had arrived and the days were brighter, evening came later, mimosas were blooming and small white daffodils and Star-of-Bethlehem flowers unfolded about the olive trees, while the grass on the hillsides and plains became greener and in the slopes round holes emerged, through which I suspected snakes would soon leave hibernation, and sounding into these evenings, still brisk but ringing with blackbirds, imbued with a velvety blue dusk, were the anxious questions of the gas fitter, who had since given up hope for defective stoves, withdrawing his subito e immediatamente, so that only the question remained: had anyone recently smelled gásse?
Campo
AT IRREGULAR INTERVALS I heard the gray and blue regional buses hum up the steep curves and with creaking brakes groan downhill. They connected Olevano to the surrounding countryside. Uphill they drove on, to Bellegra and deeper into the mountains to Rocca Santo Stefano, and twice a day to Subiaco in the hinterland; downhill they drove toward Palestrina and Rome.
From my small balcony, where in the morning I would see the cemetery lying above like a dull gray box in the shadows, I looked between olive trees and houses directly onto the bus station below in the village, across from the tunnel entrance. I saw the small toy figures waiting around the arriving and departing buses, and the mayhem of buses, cars, and humans at noon, when school let out and many people drove home to take siestas. The bus station was a flat, angular concrete building with an overhanging roof, beneath which waiting passengers could find shelter if it rained and the waiting room behind the glass wall was still locked. Next to the waiting room was a ticket counter, which was always empty, and behind it, a bar. From the bar you looked out to the plain, to a new road swerving above the precipice to the lower districts, and a kind of junkyard for discarded everyday objects, which occupied the old observation deck and had perhaps arisen at random, unintentionally—an intermediate space for the partially discarded, whose time for final absence had nevertheless not yet arrived. The tunnel and bus stop flanked the entrance to the old village like two monstrosities, fending off outsiders; at this sight many would have preferred to turn back. In summer the leafy sycamores and lindens would soften the fright, amiably inviting travelers to keep going, journey on. But now, in winter, their bare branches warned of some danger lurking ahead.
I couldn’t see the bus stop for the fog, but the stammering bellow of diesel motors was all the louder for it, and the voices of invisible waiting passengers traveled uphill more distinctly than on clear days, and occasionally I could even understand the names they called.
For some time I entertained the idea of making a trial departure, and one day I took the bus to Rome. It was early morning, twilight had just begun to show faintly. Waiting passengers wore grim expressions, their heads drawn deeply into their coat collars in the light of the street lamps. Several buses exited the tunnel at once, all advertising Rome as their destination and already filled with passengers. Most of them must have been on their way to work or school, an older couple sat speechless, clinging to a small, old-fashioned leather suitcase, and I imagined the woman was perhaps accompanying the man to the hospital. Or the other way around. Below on the plain, dawn had advanced enough that I saw the hoarfrost as a matte, pale layer, covering surfaces without glittering, since the light was still absent. A few passengers exited in Genazzano and Palestrina, scattering in the frosty morning.
The bus passed the Palestrina cemetery. In the reddish morning light it lay like a monstrous bulk among the low houses, garages, shops, and pubs in the lower part of town, which had already begun fringing into something urban, the outskirts of Rome. The bus went as far as Anagnina, the last stop on the metro line. An incremental ritual for approaching the city. I was surrounded by a gray no man’s land, between feeder roads and industrial buildings. Views of an empty region that was neither country nor city, unpopulated, navigated but not settled, smoothed and leveled into a ground of possibility, yet already allotted narrow functions, which withered at every attempted description. A land of eradication, a new alienated terrain, different from Pasolini’s outsider land, damaged by new construction, even more cramped, further beyond recognition, dispossessed of all names.
Regional buses came from all sides, churning out flocks of half-rural inhabitants, mostly women, perhaps employed in shops or offices, and students. Like everywhere else, there were helpless and restless African men, who gathered in small groups—impossible to say if their meetings were arranged by chance or plan. In the icy morning light, they trudged from one foot to the other, looked around, exchanged a few words. Perhaps they were waiting for a sign that they alone would recognize, a signal to move into the city.
On the forecourt of Stazione Termini I suddenly lost all desire for the city. In that moment I vaguely associated it with a disconsolate state, which I could anchor in neither a time nor an exact place; I felt only a cold trepidation, pervaded by pictures of the Tiber, of bridges and views of the naked forlornness of its banks, fully unrelated to the city they abutted. I took a bus and exited at Piazza Bologna, perhaps because the name inspired confidence in me, or because Piazza Bologna itself stirred a different, fully unfixed memory that I hoped to cling to against everything inconsolable, but when I got off I found nothing that offered any kind of welcoming shelter. I walked in a random direction and followed a main road, amazed by its colorless provinciality. There were few pedestrians—at this time of day no one was interested in the shops selling cheap clothes. A handful of young people shoved into small copy shops, and in the matchbox alimentari, where only random customers bought things in passing, Pakistani or Indian women sat by the doors, jammed into their tiny cashier’s corners. Before long I stood at a high wall, behind which I at first expected to find a park, until I saw the flower stands, a larger and more garish version of the kiosks at Olevano cemetery. The stands appeared to arrange their territories by flower color—there was a red, a yellow, and a white territory—and all the flowers looked artificial, but proved on closer inspection to be uniform cultivated varieties, blooming bare and debellished of all unnecessary leaves: gerberas, chrysanthemums, lilies.
An onoranze funebri hearse rolled slowly across the courtyard toward the gate. The procession consisted of five or six cars, covered in city dust, transporting mourners who looked listlessly or sullenly out the windows. Perhaps it was an unloved elderly uncle with an unsettled legacy, for whom handkerchiefs were waved all the