Death in Rome Page 2

  The greenery in the concert hall looked dusty. It probably was laurel after all, the leaves had the look of dried herbs swimming in soup, moistened but still brittle and unsoftened by cooking. They depressed Siegfried, who didn't want to be sad in Rome. The leaves reminded him of a succession of soups in his life: the Eintopf at the Party school that his father had sent him to on Uncle Judejahn's recommendation, the field-kitchens of the army, to which Siegfried had fled from school; the Party's Junker school had had green bay trees too, and there were oak leaves in the barracks, proliferating on decorations and on tombstones, and there had always been a picture of that twitchy and repressed type, the Führer, with his Charlie Chaplin moustache, looking benevolently down on his herd of sacrificial lambs, the boys in uniform now ready for the slaughter. Here, among the laurel and oleander of the concert hall, in this chilly indoor grove, there was an old portrait of the master, Palestrina, looking far from benevolent, no, surveying the orchestra's efforts sternly and reproachfully. The Council of Trent had accepted Palestrina's music. The congress in Rome would reject Siegfried's. That too depressed Siegfried, depressed him while still rehearsing, depressed him even though he'd come to Rome expecting to be rejected, telling himself he didn't care.

  There is a trench going round the Pantheon that was once the street that led from the Temple of All the Gods to the Baths of Agrippa; the Roman imperium collapsed, debris filled up the trench, archaeologists laid it bare again, masonry stumps rise up mossy and ruined, and sitting on top of them are the cats. There are cats all over Rome, they are the city's oldest inhabitants, a proud race like the Orsinis and the Colonnas, they are really the last true Romans, but they have fallen on hard times. Imperial names they have! Othello, Caligula, Nero, Tiberius. Children swarm round them, calling to them, taunting them. The voices of the children are loud, shrill, voluble, so appealing to a foreign ear. They lie on their fronts on the wall that runs alongside the ditch. School ribbons transform the grimy faces into little Renoirs. The girls' pinafores have ridden up, the boys wear tiny shorts, their legs look like those of statues under a patina of dust and sun. That's the beauty of Italy. Suddenly laughter rings out. They're laughing at an old woman. Compassion always has a pathetic aspect. The old woman hobbles along with a stick, bringing the cats something to eat. Something wrapped in a foul, sodden newspaper. Fishheads. On a blood-smeared newspaper photograph the American secretary of state and the Russian foreign minister are shaking hands. Myopic the pair of them. Their glasses blink. Thin lips compressed in a smile. The cats growl and hiss at each other. The old woman tosses the paper into the trench. Severed heads of sea-creatures, dull eyes, discoloured gills, opalescent scales, tumble among the yowling moggy mob. Carrion, a sharp whiff of excrement, secretions and sex, and the sweet smell of decay and purulence rise into the air, mixed with the exhaust fumes on the street, and the fresh, tempting aroma of coffee from the espresso bar on the corner of the Piazza della Rotonda. The cats fight over the leftovers. It's a matter of life and death. Foolish creatures, why did they have to multiply! There are hundreds of them starving and homeless, randy, pregnant, cannibalistic; they are diseased and abandoned, and they have sunk about as far as cats can sink. One torn with a bullish skull, sulphur-yellow and bristle-haired, lords it over the weaker ones. He puts his paw down. He doles out. He takes for himself. His face bears the scars of past power struggles. He is missing part of an ear—a lost campaign. There is mange on his fur. The adoring children call him 'Benito'.

  I was sitting at a zinc table, on a zinc chair, so light the wind might have carried me off. I was happy, I was telling myself, because I was in Rome, on the pavement terrace of an espresso bar on the corner of the Piazza della Rotonda in Rome, and I was drinking a brandy. The brandy also was light and flighty, light metal, like distilled zinc. It was grappa, and I was drinking it because I'd read in Hemingway that that's what you should drink in Italy. I wanted to be cheerful, but I didn't feel cheerful. Something was gnawing me. Perhaps the awful mob of cats were gnawing me. No one likes seeing poverty, and a few pennies weren't enough to absolve you here. I never know what to do. I avert my eye. A lot of people do, but it bothers me. Hemingway doesn't seem to know the first thing about brandy. The grappa tasted mouldy and synthetic. It tasted like German black-market brandy from the Reichsmark period. Once I got ten bottles of brandy like that in exchange for a Lenbach. The Lenbach was a sketch of Bismarck; I did the deal with a Puerto Rican in GI uniform. The brandy was distilled from fuel for the V2 rockets that were supposed to destroy London: you flew off in the air when you drank it, but that's all right, the Lenbach was faked as well. Now we had the 'economic miracle' in Germany, and good brandy. The Italians probably had decent brandy too, but they didn't have an economic miracle. I surveyed the square. I saw the state being swindled. A young woman was selling American cigarettes from her dirty apron. I felt reminded of the cats. The woman was the human equivalent of those poor creatures, ragged and unkempt and covered with open sores. She was miserable and degraded; her kind too had multiplied too quickly, and they had been weakened by lust and hunger. Now she was hoping to get rich illegally. She was ready to worship the golden calf; but I wasn't sure whether it would answer her prayers. I had a feeling this woman might be murdered. I could see her strangled body, whereas she probably saw herself as a proper businesswoman, a dignified signora, enthroned in a legitimate kiosk. On the piazza, the golden calf condescended to nuzzle the woman. She seemed to be well known in the area. Like a buoy she stood in the flow of traffic, and the deft little Fiats swam boldly up to her. How the brakes squealed! The drivers, handsome men with curled, with waved, with pomaded hair, with buffed and scented scalps if they were bald, passed money out through the windows of their cars, took their packets on board, and their little Fiats would chase off to the next port of call, the next fraudulent little transaction. A young Communist woman walked up. I could tell by the bright red kerchief over her blue anorak. A proud visage! I thought, Why are you so arrogant? You deny everything, you deny the old woman feeding the cats, you deny all compassion. A youth lurked in a doorway, greasy, as though dipped in oil. He was the cigarette-seller's boyfriend, her protégé or her protector; or maybe he was her boss, a serious businessman concerned about his volumes and his margins; whatever he was, I think he was the Devil with whom Fate had paired this woman. Every so often the two of them would meet on the piazza, as though by chance. She would slip him her takings, a bunch of dirty lira notes, and he would pass her fresh, shiny cellophane-wrapped packs. A carabiniere was standing there in his flashy uniform like his own monument, and was looking across at the Pantheon with a bored sneer. I thought, You and that little Communist would make a fine pair, you'd nationalize the cats, the compassionate old woman would die in a state nursing home, the fishheads would be taken into public ownership, and everything would be organized out of existence. But for the moment there was still disorder and happening. Newspaper-sellers cried their wares with hoarse, pleading shouts. They've always had my admiration. They are the rhapsodes and panegyricists of crimes, of accidents, of scandals and national commotions. The European bastion in Indochina was about to fall. In those days, war and peace hung in the balance, only we didn't know. We didn't hear about the cataclysm that threatened us until much later, in newspapers that hadn't yet been printed. Whoever could, ate well. We sipped our coffee and our brandy; we worked hard to earn money, and if the circumstances were favourable, we slept with one another. Rome is a wonderful city for men. I was interested in music, and it looked as though a lot of other people in Rome were as well. They had come from many countries to attend the congress in the ancient capital. Asia? Asia was far off. Asia was ten hours' flight, and it was as big and remote as Hokusai's wave. The wave was coming. It lapped at the shores of Ostia, where a girl's body had been found washed up. The poor corpse went around Rome like a ghost, and her pallid image terrified cabinet ministers; but they managed, as usual, to save their skins. The wave was approaching the cliffs at
Antibes. 'Bonsoir, Monsieur Aga Khan!' Dare I say that it's not my concern? I have no bank accounts, no money, no jewels, I weigh as nothing in the balance; I am free, I have no strings of race horses and no starlets to protect. My name is Siegfried Pfaffrath. An absurd name, I know. But then again, no more absurd than many others. Why do I despise it so? I never chose it. I like to talk shamelessly, but then I feel ashamed: I behave rudely, and I long to be able to show respect. I'm a composer of serious music. My profession matches my name for absurdity. Siegfried Pfaffrath, it says on concert programmes. Why don't I use a pseudonym? I have no idea. Is it the hated name clinging to me, or do I cling to it? Will my family not let go of me? And yet I believe that everything that's done, thought, dreamed or ruined, everything in the universe, even invisible and impalpable things, concern me and reach out to me.

  A large automobile, gleaming black, noiseless engine, a lacquered coffin, the windows mirroring and impenetrable, had driven up to the Pantheon. It looked like a diplomatic conveyance—maybe the ambassador from Pluto was nestling on the plump upholstery, or a delegate from Hell—and Siegfried, drinking his brandy on the piazza and dreaming, aware of some activity but nothing out of the ordinary, looked at the licence plate and had an impression of Arab script. Who was it just drawing up, a prince from the Arabian Nights, an exiled king? A dusky-faced chauffeur in military livery leapt from his seat, tore open the passenger door, and stayed in bustling close attendance on a man in a well-fitting grey suit. The suit was English flannel, and it was the work of an expensive tailor, but on the squat body of the man—thick neck, broad shoulders, high ribcage, round elastic belly like a medicine ball, stocky thighs—the suit took on a rustic, Alpine aspect. The man had cropped bristly iron-grey hair, and he wore large dark glasses that were everything other than rustic, that suggested secrecy, cunning, foreign travel, diplomatic corps or wanted by Interpol. Was this Odysseus, on a visit to the gods? No, it was not Odysseus, not the wily king of Ithaca; this man was a butcher. He came from the Underworld, carrion smells wafted round him, he himself was Death, a brutal, mean, crude and unquestioning Death. Siegfried hadn't seen his Uncle Judejahn, who had terrorized him as a child, for thirteen years. Many times Siegfried had been punished for hiding from his uncle, and the boy had come to see his Uncle Gottlieb as the embodiment of everything he most feared and hated, the personification of duress, marching, the war. Even now he sometimes imagined he could hear the scolding, forever angry voice of the man with the bull neck, but he only dimly remembered the innumerable images of the mighty and universally feared tribune—on hoardings, on classroom walls, or as a paralysing shade on cinema screens that showed the man in ostentatiously plain Party uniform and unpolished boots, with his head thrust avidly forward. Thus, Siegfried, since escaped into freedom, drinking grappa à la Hemingway, thinking about this square in Rome and about the music which was his personal adventure, failed to recognize Gottlieb Judejahn, it never even crossed his mind that this monster had come back from the dead and surfaced in Rome. Siegfried only observed casually, and with an involuntary shudder, a corpulent, presumably wealthy foreigner, someone of consequence and unpleasant, luring the cat Benito to him, grabbing him by the scruff, and taking him off—amid the shouts and cries of the children—to his magnificent car. The chauffeur stiffened to attention like a tin soldier, and shut the door respectfully after Judejahn and Benito. The large black automobile glided silently out of the square, and in the afternoon sun Siegfried caught a glimpse of Arab script on the licence plate, until abruptly a cloud passed in front of the sun, and the car vanished in a puff of haze and dust.

  Asked along to the rehearsal by Kürenberg her husband, Ilse had been sitting, unnoticed by Siegfried, in the back row of the concert hall (which was darkened except for the lights over the orchestra pit) next to one of the green potted trees, listening to the symphony. She didn't like it. What she heard were discordant, inharmonious, mutually antagonistic sounds, a vague searching, a half-hearted experiment in which many paths were taken and none followed to its end, in which no idea asserted itself, where from the outset everything was brittle, full of doubt, doomed to despair. It seemed to Ilse that the person who had written these notes didn't know what he wanted. Did he despair because he was lost or was he lost because whichever way he went, he spread the black night of his depression, and made it impassable for himself? Kürenberg had talked a lot about Siegfried, but Ilse had yet to meet him. Up until now, she had been merely indifferent. But now Siegfried's music disturbed her, and she didn't want to be disturbed. There was something in it, some tone that made her sad. But life had taught her that sorrow and pain were best avoided. She didn't want to suffer. Not any more. She had suffered long enough. She gave beggars unusually large sums, without asking what had forced them to beg. Kürenberg could have conducted elsewhere in the world for more money, in Sydney or New York; and Ilse hadn't advised him against putting on Siegfried's symphony for the congress in Rome, but now she was sorry that he was taking trouble over something inchoate and hopeless, an expression of naked and unworthy despair.

  When the rehearsal was over, the Kürenbergs went out to eat. They liked to eat; they ate often, plentifully and well. Happily it didn't show. They did well on their good and abundant food; both were solid, not fat, well-nourished and sleek like healthy animals. As Ilse didn't say anything, Kürenberg knew that she'd disliked the symphony. It's difficult to argue with a silent opponent, and before long Kürenberg was hailing Siegfried as the most gifted composer of his generation. He had invited him back for that evening. Now he wasn't sure how Ilse would respond. He mentioned it in passing, and Ilse said, 'You asked him to our hotel?' 'Yes,' said Kürenberg. Then Ilse knew that Kürenberg, who was a passionate cook, even on the road, and they were always on the road, was going to cook for him, and that was proof that he genuinely did admire Siegfried and was courting him, and once more she was silent. But why shouldn't she join him in inviting Siegfried? She didn't like to be left out. Nor did she want to quarrel with Kürenberg. They hardly ever quarrelled. Their union was harmonious, they had been all over the world together, often travelling in grim and dangerous circumstances, without friction. Very well, Siegfried could visit them in their hotel, and they would give him dinner, that was fine by her. Kürenberg assured her Siegfried was a pleasant man, and perhaps he was; but his music, unless it were to change—and Ilse refused to believe that it could change, because these notes, however incoherent and disagreeable to her, were in their way a true reflection of a particular human destiny, and that made them unalterable—his music, however nice Siegfried might be, she would never get on with. Ilse looked at Kürenberg, walking along at her side, in his stout shoes and suit of coarse Scottish tweed, grizzled, balding, but with bright eyes in his good, solid face, a little heavy but with a firm stride and agile amid the bustle and confusion of the Roman streets. Kürenberg appeared taciturn, or, perhaps more accurately, firmly anchored in himself. Living on an intellectual plane, he was never impatient and never sentimental, and yet Ilse was convinced that his support for Siegfried was emotionally inspired; it had somehow moved him that in '44 a German prisoner-of-war in an English camp had turned to him, the voluntary émigré, and involuntary volunteer infantryman in the First World War at Langemarck, and asked him for samples of the new music. For Kürenberg, Siegfried's prisoner-of-war letter had been a sign, a message from a Europe that had collapsed into barbarism, the dove that signalled that the flood waters were receding.

  They sat down in the sun, they enjoyed the sun, they sat down on the terrace of the wickedly expensive restaurant on the Piazza Navona, they enjoyed sitting there. They looked out into the calm harmonious oval of the one-time arena, they were glad that violent era was at an end, and they lunched. They lunched on little prawns crisply fried in butter, on tender grilled chicken, dry salad leaves dressed with oil and lemon juice, large sensuous red strawberries, and with their lunch they drank a dry lively Frascati. They enjoyed the wine. They enjoyed the food. The
y were serious and calm eaters. They were serious and blithe drinkers. They hardly spoke, but they were very much in love.