The Last Bullet Is for You (7 page)

That evening, in the gazebo at the rear of the largest garden, a young violinist was pouring out the first notes of
Romance, Opus 11
by Dvo
řá
k. Tears came to my eyes and I held them back. I was alone with the beginning and end of the world, I was drowning inside, and then I split in two, the woman from before and the one who couldn't breathe, the one who followed you like a detective, who waited to meet your eyes and hear your voice, feel the warmth of your body, your scent a mixture of cologne and tobacco. Once you lifted your head and smiled at me absent-mindedly; I felt that smile was not for me. I didn't know who you were. I wondered whom I was offering my life to.

Since your arrival in Ostia, several times I caught you intently studying your cellphone. I suspected that someone, somewhere, was writing to you. I heard it was over, and that you were disappointed not to have found love. I tried not to imagine that there was a young woman somewhere, first seduced then terrified, escaping to keep from having her soul broken into pieces. I didn't dare picture the one who haunted your thoughts. The sinking feeling in my stomach told me it was too late, I had begun to suffer from the fact that there had been other women before me.

My desire was undefined. It broke into foam like the sea, tiny mirrors of what was happening inside me. I marched to the edge of the precipice and fell face first to the ground like an ordinand ready to receive the Holy Spirit. No one could tell, but I lowered my forehead and prepared to surrender.

Later, when you remembered those days, you compared me to a starfish, you said my movements were imperceptible, as if I were floating, waiting patiently for the moment to speak my desire.

You said my passive side cast a net, and that I was the one who ended up catching you.

But my life, in that waiting, had already changed. Whether our bodies came together or not, by your mere presence, a new path had been drawn inside me. I could not return to life as it had been; I was inhabited.

Love is a kind of mission, it is the Blue Eye of Siberia, and I dream of escaping to Olkhon Island in search of a shaman who will free me of you, my drug, my poison.

The night before our first night together, I lay awake in my bed. I listened to the workings of the house. The fear in my belly was matched by a feeling of the sublime. I understood that some great pulse roared inside me and urged me into action. I felt it deeply, even if I didn't know yet what would happen. That night, adrenaline ran through my veins. When sleep finally settled over me, I dreamed of a train roaring through darkness. It sped madly through thick forests of pine, then across a plain emptied of everything. The train moved forward and inside it, the walls vibrated, my eardrums hurt, soon I would die. In this world, there was only me and the train travelling over frozen ground, its belly would burst open and swallow me like the thin ice on a lake. I would cross over to the other side. My hands crossed upon my breast, my eyes closed, I prayed God to leave me my life, don't take it yet, not today, and suddenly the train ground to a stop, so quickly my body was thrown onto the seats in front of me, and my head split against the window. The racket ceased, and there was no more train. I was lying down, still breathing. Sleeping. I was dreaming that I was asleep, and in that dream, I was sleeping with you. Lying next to me, with your back turned.

That night I did not remind myself that passion is a danger, I did not hear the warnings my unconscious sent up, for the time being my fears were still inanimate. I didn't think what I should or shouldn't do, what was allowed and what was not, or what I might regret. I gave in to the desire I felt, and for the first time in my life I stopped thinking, I dived into the madness with eyes closed. I was the train speeding into the dark tunnel, the train on the edge of the cliff, carrying travellers and deportees, tourists and refugees, I was the Trans-Siberian of adventurers, drug dealers, and endless nights. Later, I would tell you that this nearly sleepless night was my baptism.

When I opened my eyes on the dusty interior of my room, the breakfast bell was sounding. Soon, half-awake bodies would slip along the hallways and go down the stairs to the dining room.

It was a day off, a group excursion to the sea, you dived in, and I stayed on the beach where Pasolini was murdered. I dug my feet into the sand, looking for shells. When you emerged from the water, you sat down and lit a cigarette. You were looking at me, you didn't take your eyes off me. I turned away timidly, with a feeling both vivid and vague that I had better erase you as quickly as possible before you wrote yourself into my life for good.

At the restaurant, the waitress presented me with a seafood tray. On a bed of ice lay a population of animals ready for dissection, and next to them, on a white napkin, a tool set that could have come from a Cronenberg film. Petrified, nauseous, a little ashamed, I sent back the plate, apologizing, but I wasn't up to the task. You looked at me, and there was tenderness in your eyes. Sitting across the table from me, you took my hand and kissed it.

You would remind me of that moment, it was a preamble I had erased from my memory, retaining only the evening that followed. My fingers running the length of your back, my trembling hands, I knew I would never reach the end of my desire for you. Your head followed the straight line down the centre of my body. You took off my clothes, you caressed me gently, you breathed in my perfume, you lingered over my open legs and kissed me softly, then stopped, you lifted your head and explored me with your eyes. I was liquid in your hands. You moved, and moved me, your hands like bracelets around my ankles. Your face pulled away, and disappeared, my body redrawn by the geography of your caress. Our cries were lost in the sound of the wind and slamming shutters, they died in the union of our bodies.

You fell asleep in the storm. I lay against you, dreaming but awake, and in that state, behind my eyelids appeared the strange image of a man covered by a tarpaulin. He was lying on the ground, it might have been the floor of a stable, holding a sickle in his arms, tightly, as if it were a woman. His straw hat stuck out from under the tarp, his hands and feet too. He looked like a scarecrow. It was five in the morning when I saw that. Unformed anxiety had come to replace desire. I did not fall back asleep.

I got up carefully to keep from waking you. Your legs were entwined in mine. I searched for my clothes in the darkness. You woke up halfway, helped me find them, kissed me fleetingly on the lips, and closed the door behind me. I heard you go back to your bed. Mine awaited me in my monastic room.

Today, another memory comes back to me, a parenthesis of doubt opened in the heart of the first night, a truth. At the time I did not recognize it, or I shunted it aside to preserve desire, I preferred to ignore it. I see that scene like a
tableau vivant
, a short sequence of film I screen over and over to understand its meaning. You are lying beneath me, I am looking at you from above. After the initial storm, we have reached a kind of peace.

You were talking to me about yourself, I had listened a little too long as you described the effect you knew you had on women, your snake charmer side. You talked and it was as if you weren't there, or someone else was in my place. I had a feeling, it was vague, that for a moment you had made me disappear, and I became Echo hoping that Narcissus would hear her voice. I thought briefly of leaving your bed. Distrust pushed forward, my vigilance returned. And then your eyes sought me out, you kissed me gently, your arm held me close, and your mouth on mine silenced all suspicion for good.

From then on, nothing could stop me, nothing and no one, not a word, a sentence, or a sign I might receive as a bad omen, I rushed headlong into this love. Today, I tell myself an angel came that night to give me one last chance, and when I let myself go, he let go of me too, he raised his arms to the sky and flew off, far away. Between Cupid and him, Cupid came out on top.

The morning after that first night, far from prying eyes, in the parking lot behind the villa, we said goodbye, not knowing if we would see each other again, never imagining for a second that one day we would be married and that one day we would separate, that I loved you too much, and that if I was guilty of something, it was confusing dreams and reality.

You were the intruder in my life, the mysterious seducer, the one who sets bodies tumbling and makes them fly above houses or run naked through the desert. You were Terence Stamp in the Pasolini film, the Eastern Bloc version.

That kind of love
was impossible to absorb, the way Rome continues to create beauty all around me, so dazzling you need to protect yourself from it with a camera lens. Which is why the hordes of tourists in the museums take pictures of the Raphael frescoes, why they compartmentalize the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with the eye of their cameras, pixelating the sublime. It's a way of domesticating beauty, putting it in a cage, then returning with the proof that they were there and survived all those marvels, their way of avoiding Stendhal syndrome.

Those pictures of you I took near Jacques-Cartier Square or among the autumn leaves in La Fontaine Park, sitting at the dining room table or naked between the sheets—their goal was to protect me too. Your face made me hesitate, like the face of Christ sculpted by Michelangelo. Your body, in the ochre glow of the bedside lamp, was the Uffizi Gallery at the end of the day.

I was twelve when I saw Rome for the first time, winter, Christmas vacation, my parents had friends there who lived in the EUR district, and they put us up. He worked for the Food and Agriculture Organization, and out of love for him, his wife followed him there. I have scattered pictures of that trip, bits of preparation for the holidays and visits to the museums, skeletal dogs wandering through the depths of the Colosseum, coffee taken at the bar, squares of pizza gobbled down as we walked across the Piazza Navona. I remember the coins we cast into the Trevi Fountain with our backs turned, making a wish to return, and the burglary, one night, in the apartment where we were staying, a hole cut through the glass door to the balcony, just big enough for a child to slip in. While we were out, the furniture had been tipped over, the drawers emptied onto the floor, the burglars had taken everything. Everything, except for a tiny purse our friends had hidden in the shower curtain before they left, a premonition of what would occur. Inside it, they had secreted the jewellery that was dearest to them, pearls and diamonds.

After the
polizia
came to the apartment, I fell asleep on the cot in the guestroom. I had no fear then. Nothing could stop me of dreaming of Italy.

That morning, we had been to the Borghese Gallery. I spent a long time in front of the Bernini sculpture of Apollo and Daphne. Apollo was in love with the nymph, and wanted to possess her. A novice soldier who wanted to join the orders of Venus, he sought the one he must love, and found her. But Daphne, devoted to Artemis, preferred the hunt to marriage, and received permission from her father to remain a virgin. He came to her rescue, and granted Daphne the power to change into a laurel tree.

Bernini shows them tightly entwined. In the story as told by Ovid, and in the life-sized sculpture, Daphne is transformed just as Apollo is about to lay his hands on her. The illusion dissipates, the beloved disappears, reality is not always what we believe. On the base of the statue, Cardinal Meffeo Barberini's words are engraved: “Those who love to pursue fleeting forms of pleasure, in the end find only leaves and bitter berries in their hands.”

You were my love, appeared and disappeared. I saw you a first time, then sought to discover what was hidden behind the veil you placed before my eyes, and, like Dante spying Beatrice on the banks of the Arno, I watched the one whom I could never really touch fade in the distance. I believed in the promise of a treasure, but you were dead to me before I found it. You were a mirage. You never really existed. I searched for you even among the laurel trees of Rome, under a burning sun, in the shade of narrow streets, in front of the statue of Giordano Bruno on the Campo de Fiori. I went looking for you in this city to which I have always been faithful, which never loses its sting in my memory, which I have never stopped loving. I went searching for you to give you up once and for all, so your image would stop blocking out the light, so shadows would cross it, so it would grow dim with the setting sun far beyond St. Peter's, so it would sink to the bottom of the Tiber.

I went searching for you, the better to lose you.

During World War II, Stalin ordered the peasants to evacuate their izbas and destroy everything, burn the harvest in the fields, the houses, leave nothing that could be useful to Hitler. The Man of Steel remembered the Russian army facing Bonaparte, he knew how his side was capable of sacrifice to win a war. He had no scruples: he ordered the earth scorched, like a guru convincing his disciples to commit suicide.

Stalin had nothing to do with Mark Antony, who also sent his men to death, losing entire regiments in the battle against Augustus before deserting to follow his beloved's fleet to Egypt. The Romans were angry at Antony for having fallen under Cleopatra's spell. They claimed that love had rendered him feminine. He spent whole days in bed, applied kohl to his eyes, and replaced war with orgies. When he was informed of Cleopatra's death, he whimpered, then took his own life. But he had been lied to, his queen was not dead, she was playing both sides to seduce Augustus and save her crown. Because Augustus was not a romantic emperor, she did not succeed in luring him into her bed. She had no choice but to die, bitten by an asp after having betrayed the love of her life.

They say that love at first sight produces nothing but flare-ups, one day the lovers must let the illusion die away, and accept reality where once fantasy stood. The actress removes her makeup, the soldier drops his armour, and I strip you away from me. By writing you, I shatter your image.

The countdown has begun. In two days I will leave this land of exile, I'll pack up my things, I'll put away
Lonely Planet
and
Cartoville
. Later, back home, I'll flip through them nostalgically, picture the districts where I wandered without even going into the museums, sitting on the edge of the sidewalk for hours and watching the crowds. I have experienced the Rome I chose. I made an illusion of it and preserved it, Rome the eternally magnificent, the eternally romantic.

From now on there will be a Rome inside me that will occupy the spot I had given over to you. I found my Eternal City in me so my life could begin again. Rome returned me to beauty and peace, the languorous sun, light and shadow chasing each other and turning the sky into the Madonna's cloak. Where once your face was, I have placed images of Rome in my memory, and it was only a half-betrayal since in Rome I found you as I lost you, I understood better who you were as I visited the remains of this monstrous empire of contrasts and passion. Surrounded by infinite beauty, I wept over you.

There was some of you here, and some of me. Rome is the vestige of an empire and its fall. I travelled here to rebuild myself. That way, not everything will have been sacked. I saved these pages like objects among the wreckage after a fire, an earthquake, a tsunami. I became a minesweeper, searching through the aftermath of a war. I dig through the remains delicately, with precision, assurance, and conviction. You will accuse me of violence, and I will show you how violence becomes poetry, how shells are disarmed.

When things were going badly, Constantine would tell me, “Stop looking at him, turn away, look somewhere else.”

I went to Rome to change my point of view, and soon I will be back on Coloniale Avenue, the name with the bad omen. I'll live with your ghost a little longer.

I fled to Rome to return to the point of departure. If I'd really wanted to be free, I would have had to desert my own head, leave behind the walls of my awareness. I understand why the pain of love turns people into alcoholics and drug addicts, and leads to madness. I understand why it opens the door to suicide. Because pain is uncontrollable, we are afraid of going mad, we consider lobotomy because our minds are under such relentless assault, and the occupier is so remorseless.

We suffer so much because we can't bring back lost love, we can't bring the dead back to life.

On my last day in Rome, my Internet account hits zero. For a few hours, all contact with the world is broken, I am cut off from the messages you might have sent me along the spiderweb that email has become.

Since I've been here, you have used social media and the world of virtual love to keep contact with me. During these few hours that have freed me from you, I lower my guard. That's how I understood the empire you have become, how I go on breathing in rhythm with your hands moving over the keyboard, I wonder what you're doing, I calculate the number of hours between Italy and the Czech Republic. Every day your image grows a little paler, but impatiently I wait to reach the heights, like those umbrella pines that seem to be perched on stilts and that, from the sky, observe the humans below. I wait for the time when I will be able to launch myself as far as possible from you, and from far above your figure will be infinitely small.

On this last day, I visit my neighbourhood again in the oppressive heat that stretches across Europe, forty-five degrees at noon. I order a last slice of pizza from Baffeto's. I eat as I walk, my slice held between two pieces of paper, the way people do it here, something you hated seeing me do because, you said, a meal should be taken sitting down in order to digest correctly, and, using the pretext of being concerned with my health, you instructed me on how to eat. It didn't matter that I shared that habit with an entire nation, you maintained your principles, and anyway, Italy wasn't your cup of tea.

In the afternoon, a hot wind rises up like a furnace blast. From the upper level of the Roma Cristiana Hop-On Hop-Off Tour Bus, I cast one last look at the city. At each station, a woman's voice in my headphones provides brief commentary concerning the history of Christianity. I didn't choose this yellow bus for its religious mission, but because it comes with a roof to protect me from the sun. Departure: St. Peter's Square, we cross the Tiber, a final gaze at the angels carrying the objects of the Passion. I say farewell to the Piazza Navona and its crowds, waiters, tourists, and sidewalk cartoonists. The bus heads for the centre, around Victor Emmanuel, goes past the Forum and the Colosseum, then a construction whose foundations, so drones the voice, dated from the fourth century B.C., and the last floors from the Middle Ages. I think that the dwelling is like you, made of layers and sediment. To know you, I began with the upper floors, then reached the basement, where your ghosts were hidden.

The bus continues to the Termini neighbourhood, then turns toward the Mouth of Truth where, when I was twelve, I was afraid it would bite off my fingers because I'd lied. I should have brought you to see if you'd lose yours when you said you loved me. Then the bus goes along the ghetto and Trastevere, and returns to St. Peter's. I do not see St. John Lateran and the little church where the Ecstasy of St. Teresa is hidden. I will not have taken the subway to Testaccio to visit the art gallery located in the old abattoirs. I will not have gone up to Gianicolo. All those spots marked with purple, blue, and pink Post-its in my
Lonely Planet
, I will have missed them all. I will not have returned to the EUR district where I went as a child, an area that has become, over time, the discreet gay village, the refuge of future priests who have not yet made their vow of chastity, and of those who have spoken it but can't quite respect it. For the last time I breathe in the diesel fumes, and hear the music of the Vespas with their colours that try to outdo those of the gelato stands.

Sit on the rooftop deck one last time. Stack the phone books in front of the door so the wind won't slam it shut. Step up to the railing that overlooks the view. Turn around and catch a glimpse of the dome of St. Peter's on the other side of the window, like a painting in its frame. See the father and his newborn between the shutters of the building across the way. Eat the tortellini I bought at the market with nut pesto. Cut the mozzarella di buffala and the little tomatoes that taste like the sun. Add oil, vinegar, and fresh basil leaves. Breathe in the smell of fried cod rising up from the street. Watch the ball of fire as it slowly drops into the endless blue, and take one last photo to keep that sky inside me. Wipe off the sweat that streams down my skin. Drink another San Pellegrino Aranciata. Write a few paragraphs, a page, make the pleasure last the way you hold back a lover's hand to draw out the caress, wait and wait and not come too fast.

I linger a while in the arms of Rome, pressed against the city, enveloped in this text. What did I recover here? What did I give up when I fell in love with you that Rome restored? What part of me clings to you, what part has been impaled in me, like a tumour needing to be excised?

I will return home like a soldier, a medal on my breast and gravely wounded, or like those Roman legionnaires ordered to commit atrocities for the good of the empire, and who returned forever changed. I am both the slaves and the patricians, the populace and the senators, the criminals and the lawyers and judges.

Rome is a city in your image, angel and demon. I found you in Rome, and I gave you up in the catacombs of St. Peter's. I loved that beauty as much as I loved you, and I found peace even if I haven't finished mourning you.

You might resent it but I have no regrets, neither for leaving you nor for refusing your invitation to meet you in Prague, and fire up the machine of hurt, the instrument of torture that quarters me between the reality of what you are and the illusion I nourished. I came here to get out of my skin. I left your empire and lifted myself up in my little Roman studio with its Japanese design, full of hidden storage spaces, interior design in the image of my mind. One by one I emptied all the drawers, and now as I leave I am sad as I face the deck with its light. I greet the forest of antennas. I say goodbye to the bee and her nest. The last time I had such difficulty leaving Italy was after I'd met you here.