hit man but drugs, drugs, it’s as if he had caught smallpox, it’s a shame, it’s not possible, unfair, for a little while he seems almost pitiable this young Turin wolf who is plunging his great family into scandal, I hope he’ll get out of the hospital before the end of the world, my neighbor looks condescending and disapproving, he shakes his head emitting little noises with his tongue as night falls outside, we are in the plains, the sad plains of Lombardy the darkness is invading thank God the twilight will be brief the bare frozen trees standing next to the electric lines will disappear soon you’ll be able to make out nothing but their shadows and the moon might emerge from the clouds from time to time to illumine the hills before Bologna, then we’ll glide towards the southwest in the Tuscan softness to Florence and finally in the same direction to Rome, still almost five hours before the Termini station, the churches, the Pope and the whole kit, the Roman caboodle: religious trinkets and ties, censors and umbrellas, all lost among the Bernini fountains and the cars, there where, on the stinking streets and the putrid Tiber, float Virgins with Child, the Saints Matthew, the Pietàs, the Depositions from the Cross, the mausoleums, the columns, the policemen, the ministers, the emperors, and the noise of a city resurrected a thousand times, gnawed by gangrene beauty and rain, which rather than some beautiful woman evokes an old scholar with superb knowledge who forgets himself in his armchair, life is leaving him in every way possible, he trembles, coughs, recites the Georgics or an ode by Horace as he pisses himself, the center of Rome empties itself in the same way, no more inhabitants, no more eating places, clothes clothes and clothes enough to make you lose your head billions of shirts hundreds of thousands of shoes millions of ties of scarves enough to cover Saint Peter, to circle the Coliseum, to bury everything beneath endless gear, and let the tourists make the tour of the antique shops in this immense religious secondhand store where gazes greedy for discoveries shine, look, I found a magnificent Borromini church under this fur coat, a ceiling by the Carracci brothers behind this hunting jacket and in this black leather boot the horns of Michelangelo’s Moses, if they weren’t waiting for me I’d never go back there, if in man’s estate everything were simpler I’d never have made this journey, never have carried this last suitcase, better my Gallic Loire than the Latin Tiber, Du Bellay’s verses learned by heart in high school, happy who like Ulysses and so on, I too have my Regrets, Ungaretti said that the Tiber was a deadly river, Ungaretti born in Alexandria in Egypt lived there until he was twenty before setting off for Rome then settling in France, there is an Alexandria in the Piedmont not very far from here, I’ve never been there, I remember in Venice I had asked in a travel agency if there were any boats to Alexandria and the employee (a blonde Venetian, a kind of barrette held in her mouth like a toothpick) had looked at me stunned, to Alexandria but there’s a train, and in that immediate confidence one has in professionals I had pictured, for a second, a train that would go from Venice to Alexandria in Egypt, direct via Trieste Zagreb Belgrade Thessalonica Istanbul Antioch Aleppo Beirut Acre and Port Said, a challenge to geopolitics and to the mind, and even, once I had understood her confusion, Alessandria in Piedmont, I began to dream of a train that would unite all the Alexandrias, a network connecting Alessandria in Piedmont Alexandria Troas in Turkey Alexandria in Egypt Alexandria in Arachosia, possibly the most mysterious of them all, lost in Afghanistan far from railroads, the train would be called the Alexander Express and would go from Alexandria Eschate in Tajikistan to Piedmont through the lips of Africa in thirteen days and as many nights, Alexandria in Egypt another decadent city a decadence that does not lack charm when it rains or when it’s dark, I remember we had a hotel there on the Corniche the first time we spent hours on the balcony facing the Mediterranean until a big block of cement broke off and came within two inches of killing a guy sitting on the terrace below, he barely raised his eyes, an Egyptian used to the sky almost falling on his head every day, in that double room I slept with Marianne, she got undressed in the bathroom, she had a body, a face to rend your soul and mine asked for nothing but that, in the scent of the Alexandrian rain and sea I got drunk on Marianne’s fragrances, our hotel was not the Cecil, nothing of Durrell in our stay, at the time I didn’t know any of his books, or Ungaretti or Cavafy that sad little employee in one of the immense banks still there in Ramleh, or in the cotton market, leaving work he visited the giant bakeries where he dreamt of Antony the vanquished one of Actium as he watched an Arab waiter sway his hips and the sun set on the Mameluk fort, at night everything looks alike, I could be in Alexandria, in that hotel on the Corniche beaten by sea spray just as my window now is streaked with rain, it was sad out and it rained, one night, slowly now, almost at a walking pace like the Italian train I join Marianne in that frozen hotel where we shivered, I close my eyes to remember this contact, the sort of crude, quick coitus, did it take place, did she just let me kiss her, I don’t think so, she had kept her sweater on her scarf the room was full of drafts but in the morning there was a big sun the sea was very blue Marianne soon left for Cairo I stayed a few more days walking around in the city and in alcohol, “Ricardo the real Alexandrian pastis” terrible Egyptian anisette I drank without ice in a plastic glass as I watched the sea, glorious solitude, in the morning a tea in one of those bakeries near the Ramleh train station with a cement croissant weighing at least a pound, watching the streetcars rattle by, in a leather armchair that might have known the idle asses of Tsirkas, of Cavafy, of Ungaretti, ghosts in this city gnawed by poverty, with its back to the Mediterranean the way you have your back to the wall, filthy and unhealthy as soon as you leave the downtown neighborhoods that are already filthy, a fine place to wait for the end of the world while you eat fried fish under a big winter sun in the hollow of the sky scoured by the wind, it’s very warm in this car, I’ll doze off, I’m already half asleep rocked by Marianne with the white arms, her face changes, deformed by the twilight elongated by the trees passing by, I went back to Alexandria I often went back there and not always in dream, to carry out more or less secret transactions with Egyptian generals whose importance was measured not by the number of their stars but their Mercedes, those generals who fought against Islamic terrorism by conscientiously rubbing their foreheads with sandpaper every night to imitate the abrasion of skin against the prayer rug until they got a callus from it and seemed more pious than their enemies, in Egypt everything is always excessive, I took down names addresses networks the traces of activists from Afghanistan or the Sudan, and the military men, each one fatter than the next, peppered their talk with in sha’ allah, allahu a’lam, la hawla, they who, with the same devotion, vigorously tortured and shot bearded men in the rear courtyards of overcrowded prisons along the Nile valley, I was indeed in Alexandria, twice I managed to go there by sea, in the summer, a ferry made the crossing from Cyprus, you could go from Beirut to Alexandria by changing boats in Larnaka which is not the most unpleasant of stopovers and, for someone carrying sensitive material as I was, was more practical than the Beirut airport swarming with Syrians, of course Marianne had stopped being there a long time before that the instant Ras et-Tin emerged from the morning fog, you felt as if you were seeing the city from behind, secretly, without any affectation, the way you surprise a naked woman at dawn in her bathroom, and the sea was so clear that, from the rail, you could count the jellyfish in the warm water: on every trip I pictured Marianne, the flash of her underwear in the freezing bedroom, the two seconds of silence facing her bare legs on the edge of the bed, which she had too quickly hidden under the sheets, outside the storm was raging, wind blew against the shutterless bay window, what were we doing in the same bed, she was probably complying with modernity, she saw in this sharing a pallet an innocence laced with danger whereas I, steeped in desire, saw only a magnificent opportunity, the rosé wine called Ruby of Egypt I had filled her with was still, along with the Ricardo, my Alexandrian madeleine: at a table with the soldiers or police officers who sipped Johnny Walker at lunch without removing their sunglasses I downed Ruby of Egypt and Omar Khayyam in big swigs happy at the memory of Marianne in front of their horrified gazes, as if the Prophet had authorized only British whisky, and I even knew someone close to the president of the Republic who stuffed himself with fried red mullet and washed it down with single malt, a symbol of status, of power, all the while telling me in detail the fate of such-and-such a person, dead under torture or in who knows what torments—why did I so rarely go to Cairo I don’t remember anymore, we were given assignments to meet in Alexandria or in Agami at the entry to the Libyan Desert, maybe because it was summer, in winter everything was different, the winter of 1998 something important was being negotiated in the capital, right against the Nile at the edge of Garden City with businessmen who looked like the Communist activists in novels by Tsirkas, boastful talkative men the kind who can put you
