Provoked in Venice: The Rider Quintet, vol. 3

"Normalissimo"

"NORMALISSIMO" I Archival Material Skylines—the vertical passion parallel to our own. The slow barges on East River and Hudson, circling. Human beings: vertical creaturesin a horizontal world, set naturally against nature, against architecture: this eye-soring puzzle of roofs, straight up and down; lines broken only by water towers poised like spaceships to lift off in the mist. But in Rome the sprawl grows endlessly on all sides of the Tiber, breaks down, honors the jaggedness of ruins,walls the impatient prophets once hopped eagerlyto glimpse a wry indeterminate future. It grows harder by the hour to have a moment alone and free from technos encroaching as this third millennium approaches, but we find time, before pouring onto the parasol-studded black sand at Ostia-by-the-Sea to have a few long gulps of warm peach tea. I'm glad thatyou had the decency to make some mention that in spite of the traffic, and your American friend hysterical (and stalked by her husband on the cell-phone she kept on her person at all times: why should she and their two sons gallivant while he lay dying . . . impatiently . . . without enough oxygen getting to hisbrain to keep him sane, which she assures me he had been when they tied the knot) 3 about running out ofgasand arriving at another closed ruin, you stillgot afew moments toyourself at the oldport itself, which is its own . . . revenge. 2 Ostia A minute of silencein the deserted amphitheater. Antique instruments compel the emptiness, like the ram's horn blown on Rosh Hashanah. And the ones who scurrythrough the site as the gates are closing pause only to shoot each other on the absent stage. No matter. I was destined to leave soon anyway because three young boys are dying for a swim promised in exchange for enduring (yet another!) ruin. And what about thefun they are having saving this oldportfrom thebarbarians. Being always surrounded by danger becomes another way of being. 3 "Normalissimo' My father dragged me to Florida as a child where I was appalled to seemiles of bodies, slathered with Coppertone, spread out on chaise lounges. There seemed no point: why was this superior to staying in my room and watching television. Or go the way of that which history claims in the instant of itsvanishing 4 of that which was once known as history, and not a meager stream of candidates for obsolescence; like out of print classics; and dreams. This is the very image of our time: someone answering a question as if it were an accusation. No wonder my American friend who resides in Rome couldn't let go of the way the girl's mother—in reply to my question— said that the white, shell-shaped "chips" her daughter crunched dragging the crackling cellophane bag over Ostia's black sand were "normalissimo," wielding the word with an emphasis that made usall angry, and suspicious, because her tone was so damn condescending. A dash to the snack bar at closing time. Forefingers tapping digital watches. Shaking heads grunting "chuiso, chuiso." But it would take more than a grizzled gruffness on automatic pilot to keep us, manic and determined, from checking out what was in those chips. Miranda challenged the Italians in fluent Italian with "what'stheproblemthesechildren havetoeatorthey'lllevitateandyoucanthen peelthemoffthewalls." 5 Of real potatoes—no sign amidst the arcane, polysyllabic list of artificial substances to rival Homer's catalogue of ships. The word—and thewayshesaid itpreyed on our minds, like an ominous sign, or an emblem of a value system out of science fiction, legitimizing this obscene blind, sweeping "normalissimo." She was in this a true descendantof Mussolini, who worked like the devil toput someorder in the chaos that wasRome. "We can't changeour nature but we can changethe way things are done. " You mean dub every foreign film so that people don't get any wrong ideas. Hey little devil who doyou think createdyour beloved Cmecina., where so many of the films you'reso crazy about weremade? I'm not sure about that. That's wherethe Italian films are made. No kidding. (Pause.) I'm not sure that the ones made in Cinecitta are the ones I've taken to heart, but there are probably some. What about that utterly boring drivel you once convinced me to see in Colorado, Contempt, which you've been obsessed with for reasons I'll never never never understand...