The vegetable farmers made rounds to the small shops and occasionally brought something to the Arab store, but they never made it to the market place, which was reserved for delivery vans and pick-up trucks, from which all the goods and fixtures for the stands were unloaded in the blink of an eye. On Monday mornings the sound of stands being assembled carried up to my apartment; the merchants were experienced, they constructed the same stands with the same hand movements in a different place every day, offered and sold the same goods—an inexhaustible supply of polyester pillows and fleece blankets, aluminum cooking pots and teacups embellished with sentimental, pseudo-Chinese sayings in bad English. A few stands selling citrus fruit and potatoes could be found as well, and from time to time a merchant hawking hundreds of tiny cactuses. There were also other items with the appearance of utility: kitchen accessories made from colorful synthetics, fake-leather jackets and faux-fur coats, hand towels, sponges and cleaning towels. The clientele at the marketplace was so scarce that I could hardly fathom how the merchants brought themselves to make the trip anew every Monday. Between the market and the road was a long, connected row of low buildings, medical facilities with X-ray labs, ECG clinics, a dentist’s office, an urgent care clinic that treated minor accidents like lacerations, slight scalds, and falls from step-ladders and, as it appeared to me, these facilities also provided the market with most of its customers. The spouses of ECG candidates whiled away the wait-time there, and the injured, freshly trussed, looked for cheap band-aids to cover their lacerations after the gauze came off, searching with stiffly and conspicuously bandaged hands.
Meanwhile in the anterior, old, south and westward-facing part of the village, African men hung about Piazzale Aldo Moro on market Mondays, seeking buyers for three-packs of socks or men’s underwear. When the weather was nice they would drift slowly with their goods past the elderly, who sunned themselves there, and afterwards try their luck with the young women who brought their children to the playground. Around noon necessity compelled them to be bolder, and they entered the small shops in the lower part of the village and addressed customers purchasing parmesan, oranges, or notebooks, risking the anger of shop owners and employees. I never saw anyone make a successful transaction. I once watched a group of African men meet in a neglected corner at the edge of the playground around lunchtime in order to stuff the socks and underwear back into a black plastic bag. One of them shouldered the bag, while the others searched the ground for cigarettes, rummaged through the trashcans for something to eat and triumphantly pulled out a box of rejected pizza crusts. Then they walked to the bus that would bring them back to Cave, Palestrina, or the suburbs of Rome; they probably hadn’t made any money, and tomorrow would try their luck elsewhere with the socks. They never begged and their polite phrases, uttered in a practiced, singsong Italian, which they must have known, after all, almost never worked, gave them a thin veneer of belonging. I never bought anything from them, even though every Monday I intended to; I had no use now in my life for men’s socks, and feared that such a sympathy purchase would tug at my leaden heart even harder than artichokes and oranges. But the African vendors and I occasionally exchanged sideways glances, and I imagined that we mutually recognized, sized each other up as actors on a stage of foreignness—surely unnoticed by the locals—each concerned with his own fragmented role, whose significance for the entire play, directed from an unknown place, might never come to light.
Hands
EACH MORNING I awoke in an alien place. Behind a tall mountain with snow lingering in its hollows, the day broke, gray and blue, sometimes turquoise and yellow. Fog often still covered the plain, at times in individual drawn-out banks, which looked like frozen bodies of water. Each morning it was as if I had to learn everything anew. How to unscrew the moka pot, fill it with ground coffee and turn on the burner, cut bread and set the table, even for the smallest meal. Memories of actions drummed against the top of my skull, as if a sea were swashing inside there, and they rose from its depths, distorted. Dressing. Washing. Applying bandages. The imposition of my hands.
I stood at the window, waiting for the water in the moka pot to boil. I looked out onto the village and the plain, which extends to the chain of dormant volcanic mountains; beyond that I pictured the seaside, even though I knew it was farther away. The expansiveness of the plain was an optical illusion—I had seen for myself that a small hill ridge lay before Valmontone—but this flat terrain, where tucked between woods and groves were small villages and farmsteads, workshops and supermarkets, and an oil mill, closed due to the olive tree disease, was a connected basin for me, a former lake whose water had once slipped away somewhere unknown, and in whose bed, while raking through the ashes from the olive fires and the crumbly soil beneath, you would readily find the remains of fish and other water creatures.
When after sweeping the landscape my gaze fell to my hands on the window ledge, I thought I saw M.’s hands beneath them, in the space between my fingers—white and delicate and long, his dying hands, which were so different from his living hands, and they lay beneath mine as if on a double-exposed photograph. Then the coffee maker hissed, and the coffee boiled over, and my living hands had to break away from M.’s white hands in order to turn off the stove and remove the pot, but I inevitably burned myself, and this pain made me aware that I hadn’t relearned anything yet.
Arduously and despite what my hands had unlearned, I fumbled my way to my camera and to photographing. I lifted the camera and looked through the viewfinder. At last I clumsily tore open a box of film and began loading the camera. Over the years it had so often seemed as if the movements performed by my hands had become part of me. While working with my negatives I sensed retrospectively that each instance of changing film—the pressure of the crank, the spool, and the camera’s external coating on my fingertips, the smoothness of the black film leader, the process of inserting the leader into the spindle—had left an impression on me, and that these gestures had been added to my repertoire of hand movements. Executing them had moored a memory in this part of my body, which became operative and led the process, even if in my thoughts I was somewhere else entirely. Each sheet, with its four slots for negatives, was a testament to this habit’s gradual colonization of my hands. That had satisfied me. Now, sitting with my back to the sun and the view to the valley, with uncertain hands I needed half an hour just to load a roll of film. I had to recall what the numbers meant on the rings for exposure time and aperture, how to operate the light meter.
Each exposure was an effort. I stared into the viewfinder and forgot what it was I wanted to see there. I photographed details of the plain with and without the olive fires, the village in the morning light, and three columbaria in the rear, new part of the cemetery. Once I took my camera along up to the birch grove and photographed the village and the house on the hill. I photographed the vineyard, where the old man had now prepared all his grapevines for spring. Afterwards I went to the cemetery. I had one exposure left. The cemetery lay empty and silent—it was early afternoon, not the usual visiting time. Only between the columbarium walls on the street-facing side did I hear two women’s voices. They spoke so monotonously that I thought they must be praying, but as I turned the corner of a grave wall I saw the two women kneeling on the stone ground, busy cleaning the gravestones of two neighboring for-netti, conversing all the while in this droning, prayer-like tone. Cleaning products lay beside them and fresh artificial flowers, vase and all, as if of a piece. I could barely understand their conversation; their dialect clipped words at their roots. When they caught sight of me they fell silent, as if by arrangement. “Can I help?” asked the one, then the other in echo, once she saw me. I was startled and stepped back. What was there to say? There was nothing to help with. They eyed the camera hanging from my neck with suspicion, it seemed to me. I might have appeared as an intruder to them, a meddler who had no one there to mourn. They might not have been mourners; perhaps they were busying themselves, merely out of a sense of obligation, with the fornetti of long-dead aunts or uncles, childless distant relatives whose legacy they had perhaps partially inherited and whom they felt to owe certain duties, like the cleaning of gravestones and replacing of years-old artificial flowers, gone brittle and pale from the wind and weather. My wandering through the cemetery among the graves of people whose terminated lives I had no connection to might have appeared strange to the bereaved, offensive even. I took off, saving my last exposure for a different occasion.
In the evening I stood at the window and looked out into the darkness. Twilight was almost always beautiful, the sun