Consolation Miracle

All the Ashtrays in Rome

51 All the Ashtrays in Rome The popes, I mean in their own way, made a holy water stoup of Rome. We Italians, I mean in our own way, have made it into an ashtray. —Pirandello, The Late Mattia Pascal Call it the end of an empire, consumed, turned by English into a verb: to be always in the image of the ancient pilgrimage. You approach the walls, the basin leading into Ostia still burning with the memory of Visigoths, can almost imagine the old roam through the capital. So unbearable, the heat from the Coliseum, its scalloped ruins, Circus Maximus, Hadrian’s Mausoleum, and how they all approximate the ashtray. You don’t even need to be a smoker to want to find a use for all that ash. Make it sacred, as Etruscans did. (Not having cigarettes, they used their dead.) Or export it to America in wicker bottles, cardboard funeraries, memento mori. You’d be Nero-famous. Like Al Gore smashing federal ashtrays on TV. Millions listened to him preach about the government waste inherent in the glass. Hammer in his hand, It’s not the ashtray I’m against, he said, the swelling crowds cheering for the blow. 52 Consider the virtues of the ashtray: depository of the bleakest moments, way station for what cannot be inhaled, digested, given back to Caesar. For that time after the snuffing out and the emptying of its bowl, the ashtray is a continuation of the ascetic mind. Hell, it could be anywhere. Who hasn’t seen the women crowd around a cupped palm with a flame inside, cigarettes reaching out like white tongues. Or the lone man in the park on Sunday drifting through the sands of tall ashtrays for the one half-smoked, his face slowly pulled into his mouth. There must be days even he’s convinced he’s really living on cigarettes and coffee, which brings us back to Rome. I’ve sat in bars and watched the slow wave of smoke as the door opens again. I’ve watched them by the hundreds, cigarettes resting on their beveled edges, all the ashtrays in Rome: the seashells put to task, the bronze, the silver, glass—a history of western civilization inside each bar. Though it wasn’t always so glamorous. The day Rome turned to the cult of the living, ashtrays filled at twice the speed, spilled onto the counters, shoes, the lapdogs 53 tied to sinking monuments. The Baths of Caracalla went dry. Everywhere the ash kept falling, cigarettes poised in the manner of Byzantine art: stiff, long, and usually symbolic. Come morning ashtrays waited like open mouths. They teetered on the bar, though the cost was factored in. Some shattered. Others outlived their users. What is the misfortune of breaking ashtrays? Because when it was over, and the crew swept up, they kept the fragments for their mantles. To think: our very own vice president smashing ashtrays. And we rested well that night, replaying that ecstatic moment when the hammer fell, and everyone gasped. And it rained, or we imagined it rained, crystals, incessantly. And we awoke in cities made of glass. ...