The Couple: The Rider Quintet, vol. 4

VOLTERRA

VOLTERRA There's a dark side to the light inVolterra. It's nothing like the brutal, capsizing,pulverizingstare on the sun-blinded streets of Marseille, and you're free to scramble through lowtunnels that form a maze of their own and must have concussed many an unwary attacker. I arrived just in time to watch shutters close, shops darken. Stark streets, hard and harsh walls. Nothing like it in the world. It sounded like it could bite,Volterra. It sounded like what it was: a remote, fortified city in the heights. The drawback—not the labor ofhauling provisions up those steep cliffs, but something more impalpable: stasis. At midday this unsparing, sunlessglare, releases the pain in the basalt, an ancient pain, preserved in the twisted torsos and anguished expressions of the Etruscan couple on a sarcophagus lid. Places do this, when they're unmasked. Reveal their history in an instant. It was out of kilter, Volterra, tilted. A woman's head, gigantic,pre-perspective, grotesque, leans out of a second story window, disapproving. Familiar German appliances sparkle in the windows of the shops. My mood began to go down. There was so much pain. 146 Every step forward brought more fortress, more isolation. But Etruscan, not Roman. An improvisation. Not a system. Volterra, isolated from the other Etruscan cities even before the Romans—the real barbarians—broke through the gate and brought the future to Volterra. But the Volterranscouldn't take the time away from livinglife to acquire Roman know-how. There was alwaysthe chance of exuberance, the dance, and what came after. The sun in our faces as we walk down the decline to the scarcelymarked tombs, dark moldy cavesfilledwith nothing— except lidless sarcophagi platforms and lizards, quick, alert, maybe grateful for the company. It's a bleak place, this ruined ruin, sightless site, whose treasures are set among other inestimable plunder, in the Villa Guilia or Volterra's own Guarnacci museum. I walk many times this distance in Bologna or Rome without my legsturning to stone. This wasn't the soreness of other excesses. (—Mere fun compared to how Voltaren burns like an acetylene torch through the stomach liningsof the living.) But the almost unspeakable quiet ofsiesta is like metal brushes on drumskin or cymbals. A yellow sign points toward the cliffs: 147 the shadows under the cypressesand pines. What relief to breathe easilyfor a while in the heights, beneath the desert flower—broom— resilient, firm, and strong though rooted in arid soil and cinders like the crater of Vesuvius; so beautifulwhen its blossoms are in flame. My eye rises from the cool vaults of a cracked cathedral on a hill to the Apennines,to the Alps. Ringed with towers, likeMontereggione, a delight in itself to see,Volterrais not. But it is fronted by a tercet of Etruscan heads. We exit through the gate at twilight, gentle, serene, and look up. Three heads, triangular, at the top. Muddy brown. Featureseffaced byweather. Twenty-five hundred yearsofweather. A millisecond, an hour, aday. I looked a long time at these heads, I don't know why, my spirit revived, I was lighter happier, I hugged my wife, I could feel the life return to her body too. Who is not, deep down, Volterran? There is still what happened. In this corner of the world where a little of my spirit holds itself distantly. 148 ...