The Last Bullet Is for You (4 page)

By night
, Rome changes its face, it turns into discreet fires and long shadows. Details disappear. Faded is the light of day that sharpens edges and opens streets like a territory to be discovered, so many images to be absorbed. By night, Rome puts on a chasuble, the long veil of a Madonna in mourning. The vault of the sky descends upon the earth, streetlamps are like fireflies winking in the night. The eyes seek out what they must find, but all is not given, the city is like a body slowly revealing itself, we discover it like a blind man's caress, in slow steps. The sweep of a hand, laughter, languor, Rome takes on new life as I watch, my eyes comforted by darkness, a gentle night. I am troubled by everything daylight hid from me. Wound in black, the city seems to become what it was in antiquity, stories run down the alleys, enter through secret doors, slip down well concealed tunnels, ghosts begin to breathe again. The city becomes the place where Dante's errant souls wait, who have asked nothing from God or anyone else, the place where present and past are married.

When the pain gets too intense, I try the therapy of exhaustion. I walk for hours through the Centro Storico, through Trastevere, the old Jewish ghetto, I lose myself in the old streets. I keep returning to Via dei Coronari, I dream of buying things I can't possibly afford from the shop windows on Via del Babuino, I order a coffee on the Piazza del Popolo and share my croissant with a very cheeky sparrow that has landed on my table. Often I move through the streets blindly. I let my steps carry me forward, moved by people who brush by me, the cloak of the sun wraps around my body. Then, some unknown signal awakens me, I come back to reality and lift my eyes to look.

Sometimes, when beauty strikes, I don't know how to take it in. It is heavy and dense, it takes up all the space, and I understand why tourists put a lens between the world and the gaze they cast upon it. They want to protect themselves. Beauty can be intolerable, it can turn the world into an impossible place, because if you lose it after you've found it, what remains?

During these long walks, I try to escape myself. Walk, more and more, faster and further, like centrifugal-force machines that scientists use to separate wheat from chaff. I leave behind the four walls of my mind and surrender to the city's heat. I am in an open-air monastery, and I pray to be given the faith I need to cross the desert.

Drink a glass of Prosecco. Meet a very thin and very tall Dutchman who drags me through the churches of Rome at night to see the Caravaggios that you can view if you slip some coins in a slot, tease him by asking if he's the Flying Dutchman. Spend hours on St. Peter's Square looking at the crowd, the police with their ears fastened to their cellphones, the priests walking with a regal gait, lovers entwined. Walk along the banks of the Tiber. Gaze at the city from the Pincio Gardens. Try to roll my r's without getting it right. Eat a plate of carbonara with plenty of black pepper. Pull off the leaves of fried artichokes. Go to Arsenale and fall in love with an anthracite silk dress. Listen to the Dutch guide tell me about the Pope and Mussolini. Eat a raspberry-and-chocolate-flavoured gelato. Write on the rooftop deck until late in the evening. Watch
Rome
, the series, then fall asleep and dream that I'm caressing Titus Pullo. Get woken up by the traffic at six in the morning. Write on the deck before it gets too hot. Wave to the owner who never leaves her place except to do the shopping and hang her clothes out to dry. Go down six floors without an elevator. Wait for the pleasure of taking a shower at the end of the day. Go out in the burning heat. Read Ovid's
The Art of Love
. Think about you and try not to anymore, and if I don't succeed, take off running. Walk down Borgo Pio and pretend not to look like a tourist. Scream silently because I have been taken prisoner by a crowd moving like a tide of mud through the Vatican museums. Order an iced cappuccino at Castroni's as consolation. Buy a jean skirt for five euros in the street from a Pakistani vendor, and spot him again when I go by late that evening as he's packing up his wares and folding up his tent, tables, and boxes and stowing them in the back of a white truck. Wake up, make coffee, spread Nutella on some whole-wheat crackers, eat an extremely juicy peach. Splash myself with water from a public fountain. Regret not being able to make love. Cry on St. Peter's Square, hoping no one will see me, and hoping that someone will.

When I feel my mind turning to you, I grab it by the neck and push it over to the window so it can see the dome against the sky behind the buildings and the tall umbrella pines. My eyes settle on the orange glow of the apartment block across the way. The shutters are open, and I see a young family getting ready for dinner. Their neighbour, an old woman, steps out to see whether the heat has fallen and it's safe for her to go out. I lean out the window and six floors down I see cars and people moving slowly through the heat of Via Candia. I return to the deck and the forest of TV antennas that look like a contemporary art installation. I sit down and listen to the noise that plates make in the building's inner courtyard, then go on writing.

In the opening of a metal pipe, a bee is building its house. Every morning, as I watch from the table, it makes countless trips between the flowers and the pipe. I see it cross the deck, gather a load, and return with its feet heavy with yellow moss that I imagine it will push into the pipe to build its nest. If I get in its way, it politely flies around me and continues its work. I would like to be an ant and slip into the pipe to see what is going on there. I would like to be another bee so this one would hold me in its embrace and rock me to sleep.

You made your nest in me. You opened your bags, and out jumped snakes and cockroaches, mermaids, jellyfish, a dragon, and a firebird, the hell of the Garden of Earthly Delights. Little by little, they took up residence. At night they moved through the house, they made themselves at home. Sometimes, in the morning, they would lie low, dispersed by dawn light. Then they would come creeping back, emboldened by nightfall. They recovered their lost ground, moving forward stealthily, pitilessly occupying the territory.

I was the house you inhabited. I knew every inch of it except the narrow space you occupied, that dark room with the windows bolted shut where you crouched, head lowered, knees against your chest like a child who's been punished. That casket where you lay so alone, I stood before it hoping one day that the cover would open and like Lazarus or Raskolnikov, you would resuscitate or, finally, that you might be born.

You told me the story of a soldier who returned to Leningrad, from the front. On the way back home, he saw corpses, dead bodies on the ground, the victims of hunger, horses that had been put out of their misery, looted farms. In front of his house, his wife was waiting. She was well dressed, her hair freshly coiffed, her lips reddened. She spotted him and rushed to his side, gathered him in her arms, covered his face with kisses, and promised she would never let him out of her sight. He was dirty, thin, he smelled bad. She didn't notice that something in his eyes had changed.

The soldier dropped his pack on the ground and looked around. She took his hand and led him into the kitchen. She had set the table. A chicken, potatoes, beets, cabbage—she had made a feast for him. He stared and said nothing. Then a veil of deep misery fell across his face like a mask. His wife was invisible to him. Ill at ease, she asked him, “What's wrong?”

There were no words for the look in his eyes. He didn't understand where she had found all this life, whom she had taken it from, and what she had traded to get it. He picked up his gun and aimed at her. He fired once twice three times until the house was empty, just like him.

You lived in a dark room in the middle of an abandoned house where ghosts swept past, beings that had not been freed by those they had left. In this place, torment buzzed, it was a house built on a torrent. You lived alone in the dark room I could not enter. I called to you from where I stood, a space that was neither your dwelling nor mine, a kind of decompression chamber, the departure lounge of an airport, the waiting room in a medical clinic. I answered your calls and your demands. I kept the tension in the line that bound us. I refused to leave the garden and turn my back on you.

Each time my words came to knock on the door of that house, the dragon would rush out, ready to breathe fire and keep me from coming closer. Brambles began to grow against the walls, and moats were dug all around. You practised provocation. You flew into a rage because I would not obey the laws of your kingdom. Your words rattled like a hail of machine-gun fire, they tightened their ranks, their shields raised one next to the other in a square formation, like a fortress. I sought a way in, I set my syntax against yours, I would not resign and accept the unfair, senseless things you said. But your rage did not lessen. I pulled you near and you resisted until finally I retreated in exhaustion. Then it started over one more time, I left once again for the front. It was a strange reversal: I was the knight and you the damsel, prisoner of the tower, but when I reached the top, you refused to budge. Instead of following me, you preferred your own dreams as if they were reality.

Sometimes I would give in and retreat into myself and question my desire. I left the abandoned house. I let a forest of thorns grow over you. Only then would you venture out.

Rome is fragrant with flowering laurel, pink, white, and purple, the laurel of crowns. Between the Teatro Marcello and the Piazza Bocca della Verità, great clumps of laurel have taken over the sidewalk. I have to push through them to reach the banks of the Tiber and the bridge to Trastevere.

At the Borghese Gallery, standing before Bernini's magnificent statue of a girl transformed into a laurel tree to escape the god who would rape her, I wonder which of us was Apollo, and which Daphne?

Julius Caesar accumulated mistresses, Mark Antony's political manoeuvring dovetailed with his sexual desires, Augustus's wife regularly brought him young virgins whom he took great pleasure in deflowering. I have known more than one Caesar in my time. Caesar the gladiator for whom girls were mere dolls. Caesar the bard for whom life was a percussion concert in a minefield. Caesar the poet who published under a pseudonym to hide the fact that he was a Narcissus desperately seeking his own reflection. Caesar the philosopher who acted as if he were above it all, but wrapped himself in his mother's skirts, though she had humiliated him his whole life. How many times was I caught in their web, and had to slowly pull my feet free, fuming because I did not know how to untie the knots or dissolve their sticky juices, not knowing how to carry off a worthy
coup d'état
because I was no Brutus and I was alone, without a senate behind me?

Rome was built on blood and sperm. During my walks, I come across couples, sometimes on a bridge, other times in a park or standing by a wall in a shadowy street, couples locked in languorous kisses, couples quarrelling bitterly the way you see in the movies, voices raised and arms in the air, the girl stalking off, the boy left behind, then the girl coming back a minute later to add a few more choice words, waiting for a reaction before leaving again, the boy waiting, then running after her before she disappears for good, and a little further on I see them in each other's arms, leaning against the rail, with the Colosseum or the Vatican in the background.

My friend Constantine often said that passion is a drug. The more you yell, the more you cry, the truer love seems. Adrenaline ramping up, the wild sessions in bed, as if in love tranquility were suspect, but not violence.

Constantine knows what he's talking about. Wild women in a rage, narcissists with a thirst for power—he's met a few in his life. According to him, the art world is fertile ground, bursting with girls with borderline personalities. They stream in from everywhere, throw themselves at his feet, tattoo his sheets with evidence of their visit. They want to hang onto him, either by becoming his muse, or showing him the real facts of life. But Constantine is no fool. He came, he saw, and if he didn't always conquer, he returned with the assurance of gladiators and the stoicism of the ancients. Since then, he has been flying solo.

I tell myself that soon I'll be doing the same, and opposing your invasion with the radical retreat of my armies. You will not see me anymore, you will not hear me, you won't know where I am or what I am doing, imagining me will be your only choice.

The gladiators of ancient Rome were not what we picture today. They did not fight duels. One did not die of a fatal blow struck by the other. The loser had to acknowledge his defeat, his adversary's superior strength, and his own weakness. Standing next to the victor, he lowered his eyes and awaited the emperor's verdict— would he die or would his life be spared? The crowd took great pleasure in the scene. Such happiness in seeing the waiting man's face, and the thrill of watching him have his throat cut.

When I visited the Colosseum, I learned that the Roman gladiator was a curious character. He was a star and an object of horror. He embodied the murderer and the victim both. When he died, he would join actors, prostitutes, and people who had taken their own lives out of cowardice. Gladiators could be loved only at a distance, in the arena. It was not good form to associate with them.

But for the Romans, there was a class worse than gladiators, for true danger was not to be found in the arena, but at the theatre where the most vile impulses and the true face of men were displayed for all to see.

You said
that Montreal's grid pattern made you feel you were in Kafka's
Trial
, and to keep from getting stuck in the squares, you walked at a lively pace in a diagonal pattern, as if declaring war on space. For you, the land of the wild and the free was not synonymous with freedom, unlike Prague whose layout had to be followed on a map if you wanted to know where you were.

I had never noticed that Montreal was a checkerboard. When I walk, most of the time I don't see further than a few steps ahead, the people I pass at close range, the shop windows I go by. Then I might lift my head quickly, clothes, shoes, the sun, a pretty face, before I dive back into myself.

You said that in another life, I almost certainly had been an animal that lived close to the ground, whereas you preferred the heights, you must have been a bird.

You attacked my city as if it were my skin. You liked to say that Montreal was a hole, an overgrown village. You said it was an open-air prison inhabited by poor people whose main objective was avoiding suffering at all cost. You said that here people spent their lives waiting, they were not truly involved in existence, a welfare society was not preferable to chaos and anarchy, democracy was just another face of fascism, and a person was more alive when he had to stare down death on a sidewalk in Bombay or a sniper's bullet in Sarajevo. You thought my country was a hothouse where human beings were plugged into respirators. You said that whatever we needed, we invented, you laughed at your own joke about how we could grow strawberries in Alaska and make cakes without gluten. You said we were fragile, perishable, and afraid of everything, Americans were getting so fat that soon they wouldn't be able to move and would go the way of the dinosaurs. You raged against our lack of culinary tradition, then accused us of thinking only of food, setting meetings in restaurants as if it were a great event each and every time, instead of living in an open house like gypsies. You said we feed off fear, and I replied ironically that yes, of course, but most importantly, our real fuel was the contempt of Europeans who came here to spit on us from the height of their centuries-old cultures.

Eastern Europe occupied the same spot in my mind as the rest of the world. I was never really interested in it. I found nothing mysterious about the great cathedrals, Sputnik, or the famous Kalashnikov. The only things that made me curious were those nesting dolls with their fine dresses sculpted from linden wood, and which you can now buy in the effigy of Stalin, Gorbachev, and Vladimir Putin. I was happy with the clichés I'd picked up here and there and stored in some dusty corner of my brain, in the same area as Reunion Island and Burkina Faso, countries that for me didn't exist outside a poster in a travel agency or an advertisement. The East was just another place in the world that could be summed up by the exploitation of athletes, abandoned by their parents and sacrificed to the glory of the nation until they died in total anonymity. My knowledge was woven from proverbs, superstitions, and rituals, a collage of colourful flowery dresses, a glossy surface that reflected nothing more for me than what I knew, forests, fields, and snow, this North American Siberia where I grew up, you said it was worse than the other side because not only was the cold so intense, but the humidity too, and in any case everything was worse here than everywhere else, especially where you came from. You wondered why America existed, and why you had to suffer such a fate as a result of God's cruelty.

During your time here, you kept a journal online, and took great pleasure in insulting Quebec. One day, I copied and pasted what you had written in your mother tongue into a translation program. I expected sadness or despair, the palimpsest of the pain you experienced long ago and which, so you announced, would return with your journey here. I expected melancholy, which I had anticipated before you came, the hours we would spend in shared solitude, less to make love and more to ease the transition between your
elsewhere
and my
here
. I pictured the slow passage across a dense river, a Styx you would cross but emerge from, cleansed of the fear and pain that tormented you. Instead, I discovered endless surliness and contempt in your journal, stories that mocked this place, and a portrait of Montreal as a giant garbage bag. Your disgust with Quebec was proportional to your attachment to European countries, the Czech Republic, France, and Germany, which you portrayed as a sacrificial victim. One day, you told me that by murdering the Jews in the gas chambers, Germany had chosen to commit a crime against humanity but someone had to do it, in the grand scheme of things bastards existed because they were needed, someone had to have the guts to assume the evil of others, and bad guys weren't only bad but also victims of a destiny they could not escape. The executioners always came out on top in your version, and I would listen to you, incredulous, as you spouted that nonsense.

You preached love and compassion, with your long legs folded beneath you twice a day in the asana position, you could endure those contortions for hours without moving, you were channelling a master and claimed to be receiving his light from the other side of the globe, you opened wide the sluice of your hatred and with a clear conscience poured it upon the place where my ancestors set down roots, people from Normandy who immigrated here before the Seven Years' War and remained along the St. Lawrence River. In time, some had become lawyers, politicians, and doctors, and they themselves had had boys, some of whom were writers, men who like all Québécois were failures, unlike the males of your country, and especially you, the superman, the Übermensch.

You turned Quebec into a monstrosity, and me with it. I took on the features of one of those extraterrestrials whose existence you liked to believe in because they put a face to your fears, the fear of being loved and having to trust someone, as if love were an obstacle to the potency you lusted after, and would deprive you of the power you always wanted to wield because it alone gave you the illusion of an identity, you were to follow the model of the Russian soldiers your mother admired, describing their arrival in Prague as a majestic thing, the way you had of tightening the screws on me until I imploded, until I diffracted, until I erased myself and finally stopped loving you.

I hate you for having defended the greatness of your world by spitting your venom on mine with so few scruples. I hate you for having positioned yourself in a watchtower like the ones you see in prison yards and, from that height, blasting away at us.

You liked to say you were Stalin's son. Now I understand you were Hitler's boy too.

On good days, you would ask me to tell you the story of the Patriots' War. I did as well as I could, that is, not well at all, since my recollection of history class was full of holes. The slogan “
Je me souviens
”—I remember—didn't work for me. National identity was not a thing that needed to be defended nor excused. Everyone had their place on this planet, without hierarchy and no matter their history, no country deserved it more than any other on the grounds that its cultural capital was greater, built on ruins, wars, kings, or divinities. But with you, suddenly, this was a subject for debate. You spoke of the cultures you admired, the peoples you respected, setting apart great and small nations, and I protested as if these things somehow concerned me, surprised by the way I defended that nameless, faceless thing that you called, in your careless way, country, roots, or origins.

I moved to Montreal fifteen years ago and since then the city has been part of me, its alleys and gardens, its electrical poles carved into the trunks of trees, its potholes and spiral staircases, its porches that throw a warm welcome around the houses. I like the neighbours who call from balcony to balcony, the snow that cloaks the city, the hysteria of Christmas lights, the garbage bags set like dotted lines along the sidewalk, their smell saturating the summer air. You cared nothing for the sovereignty issue and the battles over language. You said that social movements were idiotic, and I wasted my time trying to convince you of the country's newness and the giant steps it had made so far, holding tight to its language as English was working to infiltrate from all sides, that few populations had made such advancements in so short a time. People liked to say that Quebec was a relic of the colonial past resisting modernity, and I was like that quaint relic, opposing you. My resistance enraged you, and you would swell up like a frog, you changed your strategy and accused my defence, as if I should have kept quiet while you freely attacked. I never felt so
québécoise
as when faced with your assault. Coloniale Avenue became the Plains of Abraham.

I should have remained indifferent, but for that to work, I couldn't have loved you, or loved myself, or this country or any other, not the Czech Republic, Quebec, or Italy. For that to work, love could not have existed at all, I would have had to be a character in a film, the kind of psychopath that makes the lambs whimper. “First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing, ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature?”

I would have had to be an entomologist contemplating the splendour of a butterfly he has gently asphyxiated then pinned to a board, and do but one thing: talk to you about you. That way I would have told you who you were, I would have identified your species, I would have described its appearance, its behaviour in the natural world, its characteristics, and properties. In that way I would have kept you. Nothing would have touched me, neither your violence nor your sweetness, neither your capriciousness nor your terror. I would have been the Commander you admired, that statue against which you measured yourself because it was stronger than you and you would never succeed in dethroning it. You would have been neutralized. But then, would I have still loved you?

I have nothing to say against Quebec. I won't join the choir of intellectuals and artists who love to reject their culture and puff themselves up because they're closer to the old country and everyone knows that old is gold, worm-eaten woodwork, grey stone, marble, and mould. Those things seem more solid, old and immutable, the long term always wins over the ephemeral products of the new land, the logic of makeshift lodgings and fake facades, a gust of wind and everything disappears like the tourist hotels in Chennai.

Colonialism is a wound, and I go on the attack when I hear voices persuaded by their privilege, the singsong paternalism of those for whom we will never be anything more than fools, serfs, eternal losers, those who say that nothing can ever be born here, no sustainable development, only throw-away products, the dead end of the pioneers who a hundred times took up the same task, convinced that one day it would amount to something, and meanwhile others are telling us it's a mirage, we can invent but we will never establish anything that will last for all eternity.

I won't join the chorus of hypocrites.

I never knew what a family house felt like. My parents moved all the time, and I don't understand how a person can get attached to walls, whether they're built of brick, stone, or aluminum. I don't know the place I was born and I don't care to know where I'll be buried. I left the shabby village where I lived as a child and didn't know what was waiting for me at the end of the highway, and when I went back later to compare my memories to reality, I found nothing of what had occupied my mind for all those years. The place was empty. The playground was paved in cracked concrete. The hut at the entrance to the campground hadn't been repainted for ages, and the blue of the swimming pool had faded. Nothing had been replaced and the holes weren't filled the way you said they did in East Berlin, where they turned bombed-out zones into parks for kids. In my village, people built new houses at the end of a row of old wrecks, like a virus reproducing. The place smelled of despair, as if patiently waiting to disappear piece by piece into the junkyard.

I went back there with you to show you what sort of belly I had emerged from. We drove in on the 417. You squinted at the landscape of cornfields and farms adrift in endless space. Time stretched out like the white lines on the asphalt that children stare at until their heads spin. There was no one on the street, not a single living person. The solitude weighed a ton, the spruce was dying of sadness, the church steeple was alone, lost, fading into the thin fog. The village had become a cemetery, washing away the rest of the bitterness I carried within, the final regrets of childhood.

When we talked about our backgrounds, I would remind you of those pictures. To your high culture I offered up the bungalow and the rail line, and my stuttering native tongue. Deep down, I loved my village, the way I loved you when I took you there.

Last night, in my sleep, after the insomnia that has been my companion since you left, I heard you tell your stupid senseless stories again. This time it was about a neighbour woman you hardly knew at all, though you maintained that her outbursts of anger were caused by a stillborn child who had been her ancestor. I raised my eyebrows and you pushed on, you wanted to persuade me that occult forces dictate the relations between people and that we have to trust their shadowy embrace. You started talking to me about souls and the karmic cycle, the price that life makes us pay and the ancestors to whom we owe absolute fidelity. In my dream, you were the misfortune teller you had become in reality who, every day, sets down the law of bad news, the one who, in the absence of God, decides he's a guru and goes looking for disciples.

As the months went by, your belief became a science, and I was strictly forbidden from questioning it. Sometimes, the rebellious dissident, I raised my eyes to the sky. You would shoot daggers at me and resort to the blunt weapon of your truth. I needed a manual to survive, or a crash course on von Clausewitz's book on war; Hitler believed that every soldier should have a copy of it in his pack. I would have had to sign a protocol with you, the way warring countries do. Love had become a two-step of compromises and negotiated settlements to keep the peace. I was a UN Peacekeeper. I watched where I put my feet.