Grove. Esther Kinsky

I am not sure if I understood them any better now, but they had become a picture: stone, moss and grasses, there between the blue-green of wild daffodil leaves, bare stalks before any buds had arrived. Were there snakes here, between the underbrush and the cracked stone, which must be very hot in summer? In warmer months it was likely too loud, from people strolling between the graves.

      On my way back to the city of the living, I wondered why my father never brought us here. Tarquina was not far—why hadn’t he turned from Via Aurelia and driven up to the hills? He must have known, after all, what he would find there. Was he familiar with that sentence about eternity, which here could no longer remain an illusion, a fairy tale, a priest’s empty promise?

      The sun had meanwhile become sharp and dazzling. Every so often a sudden gust of cool wind blew in from the sea. I sat down at the bus stop by the empty market square and prepared for a long wait. An African man took a seat next to me, looking drawn. He leaned his head against the rear wall of the shelter and I thought he might fall asleep. Had I not been afraid of offending him, I would have stood up and given him the entire bench to sleep on. But after a few minutes he addressed me in French, with the rolling R and flat, nasal accent of a West African. He rustled in a plastic bag. I expected him to offer me men’s socks, but after a crackling search he pulled out sunglasses, crooked and cheap designer knock-offs. He took them out of the bag only halfway, looked at me, and let them slip back inside, without saying a word. Instead he asked what had brought me to Cerveteri. I described the necropolis to him. Perhaps I used the wrong words, in any case he looked at me with an expression so blank that my explanations became embarrassing, and I was relieved when the bus came. The young man didn’t get on, but raised his large hand and waved goodbye to me as the bus drove off. Chronicle of a Summer, I thought once inside the bus. And out the other window: Pasolini. His Notes Toward an African Orestes. That was the last film M. and I saw together. We had mixed up the date and arrived at the cinema to see a different Pasolini film: Uccellacci e uccellini. The Hawks and the Sparrows. We never did watch it together.

      Via

      I EXITED AT OSTIENSE STATION, grazed by a memory. Glimpses of the backs of houses along the tracks had awoken something in me somewhere, which nevertheless sunk back down once I stepped off the train. Moments later I found myself at the pyramid again. The Appian Way came to mind: a spring morning, decades ago, the white light of high fog streamed through the interstices between dark trees onto the cobblestones, which shone without being wet. It had snowed in Rome the day before, but immediately afterwards spring arrived, and that morning on the Appian Way was quiet and pleasant, remained in my memory and returned in my dreams.

      The sky clouded over in the afternoon and a cold wind blew. On that weekday in February the Appian Way was practically empty, save for an occasional car with tinted windows driving to one of the luxury villas located on the grounds behind the gravestones. Perhaps the people in the villas didn’t know that the quarters of the living should remain separate from those of the dead. The routes of the living, the Roman roads leading out into the world and coming from the world up to the city limits were bordered by places of the dead; it was the dead who escorted the living, and not the other way around. And one could speak of lingering in the streets only in terms of eternity, which appeared to be incidental here, which didn’t call out to prove itself not a fairy tale, not an illusion. The dead marked the old streets as places one ought not to linger, as long as one can keep going.