Читать книгу Grove - Esther Kinsky - Страница 20

Palestrina

SOMEWHERE ALONG THE WAY, a bit past Valmontone, a sign for Palestrina caught my eye. When I stood on my veranda in Olevano and gazed westward I would search for the town, which was linked in my mind to the composer. Lassus, Palestrina, Ockeghem, Tallis. Music that belonged to the milky, shadowless light of my life in England, a light that didn’t exist here. Many years ago, I sang in a Palestrina mass and felt myself go missing from the world in the music. Without a lament, I became invisible and could no longer see.

I set off, picturing the intersection with this sign. I had spent weeks on the hillside with a view across the plain, and was now surprised by the landscape of abandon that I encountered below at the foot of the hill. It must have escaped my notice on the way there, surely because my gaze was directed only at this mountain town in the distance, where shelter was supposedly waiting for me.

Once I had the steep, winding road behind me and drove on level land, the splayed feeling faded from the landscape. The copses, bushes, avenue trees and willows along small brooks, which from above were smoothly arched lines drawn in the landscape, slid into view here below, shrinking its vastness to a series of plots. At a distance from the road were abandoned buildings, which had perhaps once been small factories or served some agricultural purpose. Flags fluttered timidly in a mild wind in front of a shop selling discount wedding dresses. In several places they had begun leveling streets into the landscape, but I could see where they had already abandoned their work. On one such obviously deserted construction site there was still large machinery, its wheels already overgrown with scrub. The land was primed for building and the crooked signs announcing the housing development, having deteriorated into jagged fragments, protruded over the fence; a mobile home, surely there for the consultation of future home owners, was stuck above its wheels in the miry ground. Starlings circled over the fields, which perhaps were already irresolute fallow land. The plowed earth was light brown, tinged violet in the winter light. I turned onto a larger road, passed by the ragged winter remains of a tree nursery next to a tropical plant nursery, beside which was a garden restaurant with hacienda in its name. Strings of colorful lightbulbs were wound around the bare trees. Two colossal cactuses towered beside the blocked driveway gate, looking like papier-mâché. The waiters probably wore sombreros and on weekends there would be a party band with Mexican sounds, and the musicians—hobby guitarists and dazed rumbarattlers hailing from villages between Valmontone and Olevano, men between forty and fifty who were too old to get out of there—were given shots of tequila on the house and left with a meager pay. Now everything was shuttered and barricaded. The musicians would spend their evenings sitting in front of the television or solving crossword puzzles until spring arrived.

The road to Palestrina led uphill, with gentle curves and steep precipices on the one side and forested hillsides rising on the other. There was a dizzying bridge over a gorge, then the small village of Cave, which in old ochre and pink wanted to be beautiful, having either avoided the ugliness of Olevano’s hinterland or successfully hidden it from passers-through. Merchants were breaking down the market; had I studied the faces more closely on Monday, I might have recognized some of them.

Palestrina was a cat city. After a violent sleet shower the streets were empty but for the white, sand-colored, and calico tabby cats on every corner, entrance, and stoop, in makeshift shelters at the edge of fallows. Some were trusting and hopeful, others lurking and anxious, yet not feral and gaunt like their cousins in Eastern Europe—more like shrewd guardians of secret places, which feared you might find them out, discover their hideaways. Now and again a moped driver cruised past on the wet streets and the clattering would echo from the hillside, a phantom moped following close behind in the air. The raspy soundtrack of the hopelessness enveloping this region.

Palestrina proved to indeed be the birthplace of Giovanni Pierluigi, as they call him here. Open to the public, his birth house was gloomy and tended by a peculiar guard, who I imagined spent the long hours and days without visitors rehearsing his smoldering gaze. In our short conversation he claimed to not know that Giovanni Pierluigi is called Palestrina in other parts of the world. Maybe he was telling the truth.

I ascended the steep road until my leaden heart made itself known. Among small rust and rose-colored houses with corrugated iron roofs and bristly rock gardens, I stood and looked out to a different plain. At the foot of the mountain was the new town of Palestrina, every bit as haphazard as the rear side of Olevano, but more inhabited. At some distance, sticking out from the ochre-colored apartment buildings and gray single-family houses like a small foreign land, was the cemetery, marked by thick black cypresses, which towered behind a whitish wall—the graveyard’s local dress. A necropolis, which perhaps had always been there, fuori le mura, was located precisely at the center of my field of vision from here above, but also from the temple, which was situated somewhat farther below, where the city sloped into terraces and headed for the graveyard. A bit farther to the right, to the west, the landscape opened up into a large expanse and there, in fact, began Rome. Briefly I even thought I saw the sea in the far distance. Above this expanse and the bright horizon hung a large, dark blue cloud with brownish bulges, which frayed at the edges into yellow-green trembling feathers and ribbons. The visibility beneath this cloud was clear and sharp, until it began to rain again, dissolving everything into nebulousness, and even the cemetery became a blurry speck in which the cypress tops now swayed.

I searched for shelter in the museum that sat crowning, enthroned on the old temple. The rooms were filled with grave goods, stone sculptures, vessels and jewelry. I contemplated the cippi of Etruscan tombs, cone-shaped hewn stones which once marked tomb entrances, and perhaps—like the pebbles once laid again and again to separate graves in Jewish cemeteries—the boundaries of the tomb. Your realm of the dead extends up to here. From a small gallery above a pit, water rushing in its depths, one could view the Nile mosaic, an enormous series of panel pictures composed of tiny stones which depicted the fabulous creatures, landscapes, and monsters of Egypt—a story in images on the back of a massive river which might also have inspired fear in the Romans. The Tiber trickled more modestly into the sea. The Egypt of the mosaic harbored sad centaurs—half-man, half-donkey—chameleons, and various monkeys. Black men appear as hunters with bows and shields. A hippopotamus bathes in the river. Herons in flight seem to plummet to the earth toward an enormous, half-erect snake, already devouring a bird.

It stopped raining. Through a window I saw the sun in the west, surrounded by ragged violet, orange, yellow, and brownish clouds. The light streamed through the window, watery and soft. Only because of this light, an object in a display case caught my eye: a ring, the grave good of a woman, a mother of two children by two different fathers, according to the description. The ring itself, the thin metal band, was unremarkable, but in its setting was a miniature portrait of the deceased woman, a solemn face against a dark ground, sealed beneath a crystal, not clouded by a single flaw, whose cut and curvature made it seem as if she were looking at me, alive and urgent, from an unspeakable distance.