Death in Rome (15 page)

Adolf felt alone in the huge, lofty splendour that didn't seem lofty to him except in the literal sense, he felt deserted by God and by his faith in Him, he felt assailed by doubt, perhaps tempted by the Devil, who perhaps wasn't a devil, because how could a devil have made his way into the House of God, into St Peter's castle, into this hallowed and blessed shrine? And it was only the oil-lamps burning over the tomb of the Apostle that gave the chill place any warmth, but the colossal shadow of a worshipper darkened the mild, contemplative light of the oil-lamps, and made it seem like the grave of a commercial councillor. Then the sight of the admired
Pietà
gave Adolf back his breath and his faith, it freed the man struggling in snarls of ideas, suffering, shock, she seemed like compassion to him, all-embracing love, Adolf wanted to love, even if he had to force himself, he wanted to be friendly and loving to every human being he met, even his parents, even his father, the hardest case of all. Here, in front of the rightly praised
Pietà
,
Adolf prayed, he prayed for the power to love; that was the only prayer he said in the principal church of Christianity, and then, gaunt, skinny and miserable, a little deacon defeated by too much splendour, he left St Peter's, whose air and aspect he couldn't take.

I forgot what time I had agreed to meet Adolf. Was it noon or was it later? I wasn't sure. I'd forgotten. Perhaps I didn't want to remember. I didn't want to see Adolf, but all the same here I was going to the rendezvous, already caught; I was angry because I felt trapped. Adolf took away my freedom, he took away my immediate sense of life, he took away my continual astonishment at things. He took me back to the oppressiveness of youth, the past, family, morning exercises and lessons in patriotism in the Nazi academy, and even though Adolf had, like me, immediately dissociated himself from those days and their watchwords, had left home and was leading his own life in a spiritual seminary, yet the whiff of family still clung to him, clung obdurately to his priest's cassock, a stain like sweat on the skin but not to be removed by any bath, and it adhered to me too, that odour of the Judejahns and Pfaffraths and Klingspors. The Klingspor sisters were our mothers, and that meant a century of nationalist maunderings, military drill, German bourgeois constraint, which turned into horrible frenzy and megalomania each time it burst from its narrow bounds. It was weakness that made me turn up for this appointment. I felt sorry for Adolf in his priest's garb. I saw it as a disguise he'd slipped into, out of fear. The kind of thing someone gets into when he's on the run and is afraid of being spotted. But where was he running to? Was he content with running away, as I was, had he resigned himself to a life spent on the run from something, but with no destination? I found incidental pleasures on the way, or I told myself I did, but Adolf didn't really master the new life of freedom from family, freedom from obeisance to a tradition, it seemed to me, and I felt inclined, in spite of the selfishness I preached to myself—and sometimes thinking of myself seemed to be the only way of remaining pure, which begged the question whether purity was the point—against all my own selfish interest I felt inclined to help Adolf, to support him. But could I? Could I even cope with my own life? And then I thought: If Adolf and I can't cope with life, then we should at least unite against those unscrupulous people who want to rule because they are unimaginative, against the real Pfaffraths, the real Judejahns, the real Klingspors, and perhaps we could change Germany. But even as I was thinking that, it already seemed to me that Germany was past changing, that one could only change oneself, and everyone had to do that for him or herself, all alone, and I wished I was shot of Adolf.

I crossed the Angels' Bridge to the Angels' Castle, and the angels up on their pedestals, the angels with their marble wings, looked like grounded seagulls with lead in their bellies or leaden thoughts, unable to lift into the empyrean. I couldn't imagine the bridge's angels aloft. Never would they float over Rome, never push open my window, step up to my bed, enchant me with their wing-beat, show me the unearthly light of paradise. The Tiber flowed between the old stone arches, muddy, blackish, turbid, it flowed under me towards
Ostia
and the sea, it had carried a lot of dead bodies, it was an old and experienced river, and I wasn't tempted to bathe in its waters, which were like the washing-water of an old nymphomaniac crone—no, I was tempted after all because maybe I too would be murdered one day!

Adolf wasn't waiting at the gate of the Angels' Castle. I was glad. That meant I was early. Now I knew I was an hour early, and I was pleased to be there an hour early, I was standing in front of the gate of the Angels' Castle, I was at a loose end, with time on my hands, freedom!

A tour guide sat on a stool in the sun. He was reading
Avanti.
Maybe he was dreaming of a just society. He had pushed his peaked cap back from his face. His face was plump; he looked earnest and dim. His shoes were old, but highly polished. From time to time he would spit between his highly polished shoes.

A horse-drawn cab was waiting. It was unclear whether it was hired or not, or was just waiting for the sake of waiting. The coachman was asleep on the dusty cushions in the back. His open mouth gaped towards heaven. An insect buzzed around him. To the insect, the coachman's mouth must be like the entrance to hell. The coachman's mouth was both alluring and threatening. The horse had a fly-net over its head and ears. It looked down on the paving-stones with the empty disappointed expression of an old moral theologian. Whenever the guide spat between his shoes, the horse shook his head in disapproval.

There was also a large black automobile in front of the Angels' Castle. A thoroughly infernal conveyance. Maybe the Devil had some outstanding business in this former popes' residence. The car seemed familiar to me. I must have seen it before somewhere. But who hadn't seen the Devil's cab at some time in his life? The chauffeur stood beside the car, stiff as a ramrod, in military livery. He had creaking leather gaiters on, well-cut breeches and a short jacket. His face was sharply etched and sunburned. His eyes were cold and suspicious. They were the eyes of a soldier and a sentry. The chauffeur scared me. I didn't like him.

I went to the Tiber embankment. I leaned over the railing, and saw the bathing-ship looking deceptively picturesque on the river. The ship floated on the sluggish water, and it looked like a Noah's ark, a beautiful, dirty Noah's ark. Various animals, young squawking ducks and geese, young cats, young dogs of all breeds and none, lounged peaceably on its decks. On the riverbank, covered with long grass, excreta and shimmering twists of metal, accessible from the bridge by a steep staircase, a boy was chased by two youths and roughly thrown to the ground. The boy and the two youths were wearing skimpy triangular bathing-trunks in an eye-catching, screaming red. The boy was beautiful. The two fellows had poor blotchy complexions; their faces were vulgar and nasty. I knew their sort. They were disgusting to me. They were prostitutes and blackmailers, they were base, murderous and cruel. But I was alone. I wanted to be alone. Only sometimes I yearned for contact, for warmth, for the smell of the herd and the stall, for a world of shared physicality, which I had lost, from which I had cut myself off, a compulsion I thought I was clear of, the boys' world of the Teutonic castle, the smell of the dormitories, the naked bodies of boys in that spartan regime, cross-country running in the early-morning mist in the woods; and then later the world of men—the forts, camps and establishments of the nationalist movements, and the comradeship of soldiers were all comprised in this world. I had said goodbye to all that, I was alone, I wanted to be alone, and
Kürenberg
had commended the solitude of the creative person to me, but I was criminally drawn to these fellows by my background and upbringing, and they were manifestations of a guilt from which I still had to free myself. So when one of the fellows looked up and saw me up on the embankment, he grabbed the point of his triangular trunks and obscenely beckoned me down the stairs to the bank and the bathing-ship. The fellow had apelike paws and swelling muscles, a sign of degeneration and enervation rather than strength. He was repulsive to me. The other fellow was repulsive to me, too. But the beautiful boy was lying between them, pinioned not by eagles, but by these foul vultures. Zeus-Jupiter was dead, and Ganymede probably was too, I cursed myself, and I climbed down to the Underworld

he had climbed down to the dungeon, down a long passage, the gloomy, sparsely lit track wound its way down into the heart of the papal burg. And then came low arched ceilings, clammy fug, one had to walk with a stoop. Blocked-off doors indicated even worse oubliettes, bottomless pits, terrifying murderpits, death wells. The walls erupted in chains, rings for the feet, manacles for the arms, iron maidens to embrace one all over, torture instruments dangled from the ceiling, racks, bonebreakers, instruments to rip and flay, next to stone beds on which prisoners had rotted away, and the mouldering flesh and bones had etched the outline of the condemned or forgotten man even into the hard unfeeling granite. And upstairs, there were gala rooms, cushy apartments, ornamented chapels, there dwelt a keen appreciation of the arts, beautiful and holy pictures, carved prayer-stools, the silver candelabra of Cellini, in the library people pored over books, absorbed wisdom, were edified, listened to music perhaps, breathed in the evening air, and right at the top the angel hovered over the castle, the archangel Michael saw the sun, watched the glittering splendour of the stars, and looked out on the celebrated panorama of the Eternal City, and sheathed his flaming sword. Adolf had reached the lowest dungeon. A kind of amphora had been set into the bedrock where a prisoner might stand upright, his head above the floor, but his waste would have gradually climbed up his body, walled up the sinful house of the spirit, climbed up to his neck, and whoever by flickering torchlight had seen the man's head, no more than a head separated from the body by a sewer, a cry would have broken from him, '
Ecce homo.
Behold, a man,' and the gaoler knelt down and comprehended the miracle of conversion that had befallen him by grace of the prisoner in the nethermost dungeon. Adolf knelt down by the hollow and prayed. He prayed with more fervour than he had in St Peter's; he prayed for the souls of the unknown prisoners. His cassock lay in the dirt, stones crushed his knees. He believed. The world needed to be saved. He believed. Man needed to be saved. He rose and felt strangely replenished. He was on his way back upstairs, to see the full brightness of light coming out of the darkness, when he heard steps, the confident, fearless steps of someone striding purposefully through his own house, though his house is a dungeon, and Adolf, embarrassed, as though ashamed of being found in this place, tried to leave down a passage, but the passage was blocked off, and so Adolf stood concealed but able to peer through a slit in the wall, to see who it was who so confidently went to visit the nethermost dungeon

the bathing-master was like a faun, fat-bellied, wrinkle-skinned, cunning, I took Ganymede into the cell with me, I loosened the red triangle from his sex, I looked at the boy and he was beautiful, and at the sight of his beauty I was filled with happiness and sorrow

they had reached the cloister at Monte Cassino and were having a merry picnic on the battlefield. Wine was being handed round, the ladies were afraid of getting tipsy, but the gentlemen bragged how much more they had had to drink back then, the best barrels out of the cellars, and one of them remembered it all very clearly, he had been a regimental adjutant, and had overlooked the whole scene, he overlooked it now: there was the monastery, here were their positions, the enemy was over there. All in all it had been a fair fight. The war had destroyed the old monastery, but it had been destroyed in a fair fight. Everyone had fought fairly, even the enemy, and the dead had died a fair death. Dietrich Pfaffrath followed every word avidly. The new cloister with its white walls gleamed against the hillside. Where were the traces of battle? Scaffolding indicated reconstruction, and it was good and elevating to be in this idyllic landscape and to hear of a fair war, after having repudiated Mars. Stimulated by the conversation, Friedrich Wilhelm Pfaffrath spoke of Verdun. He told of the trench-fighting. Trench-fighting had been less fair, perhaps because one hadn't gone into it so sportingly, but the conduct of the war had still been decent, decent and just. The enemy had been decently and justly hated, decently and justly shot at, and if one thought back and remembered—there had been more to it than death, there were comic episodes to narrate, jolly japes from the great slaughter. They fetched more food and more bottles from the car. They ate off a white tablecloth that Frau Anna, ever the thoughtful hostess, had taken along. They drank toasts to one another, the old warriors and the young, and the women drank too. The sun shone, and off to one side stood a donkey, swished its tail against the flies and brayed, 'Ee-aw, victory was yours!' and Dietrich sat there, proud and erect, shoulders back, and he was resolved to answer the call of his fatherland, should it come to that, as no honourable man could refuse; only perhaps by then he might be indispensable to his profession, he was no coward, but he was ambitious and he thought of his career

I looked at the boy, in happiness and sorrow. I didn't dare speak to him. I didn't dare touch him. I didn't dare stroke his hair. I was filled with melancholy, bitter-sweet melancholy and bitter-sweet loneliness. But then the worst of the louts stepped into the cell, water was dripping off him, he stank of the stinking water of the Tiber, as the whole bathing-ship did, rotting and gurgling away at the planks like a thousand greedy mouths. Blotches covered the skin of the degenerate youth, pustules flowered red and poisonous on the slack bed of his vicious face, his eyes were dim, their look was cunning and hard, and the stinking water matted his hair. I loathed him. He was naked, and I abominated him. I hated myself. My boy slipped out of the door. I hated myself. The monster was alone in the cell with me. I hated myself and pressed my body against his corrupt body, put my arm round his damp neck, pressed my mouth against his mean venal mouth. I felt lust and past time, remembrance and pain, and I hated myself