Lying on the step I keep my eyes shut.
When you can taste it no more in your mouth, go to the church of Santa Maria della Vita.
I open my eyes to look up into the empty sky above the Piazza.I already know the church; there’s a Compianto there.
A group of life-size figures made in terracotta. Fifteenth century. Christ lies dead on the ground and standing around him are Joseph of Arimathea, the rich man who bought the tomb so Jesus could be buried, Mary the mother of the apostles John and James, Mary the mother of Jesus, John the storyteller and evangelist, the Mary who was Jesus’ aunt and Mary Magdalene. The sculptor is Nicolo dell’Arca who worked most of his life for the city of Bologna.
The two men in the group are calm, the four Marys are caught in a hurricane of grief. The vortex of the hurricane is Mary Magdalene. What the wind does to her clothes, the way it tears at them as she rushes forward, is the same as what her grief has done to her mouth and throat.
Yet is grief the right word? Her grief has become her own determination. Nothing will stop her.
The night after next she will be alone in the same place. The tomb will be open. Christ’s body will have disappeared. Only the shroud and head cloth will remain. And she will ask the gardener where he has placed the crucified body so she may find it and tend it. And the gardener will look at her and she will instantly recognize him, and he will say: Do not touch me. And for the first time she’ll believe he means it. Tell my disciples I have gone to my Father...
There are a few figures in art who have ended up in the wrong setting. In a painting by Velasquez there’s a Madrid stonemason, exemplary for his care and patience, who has ended up as Mars the god of war! In this compianto over the dead Christ, Mary Magdalene ends up representing every martyr-Lucy, Teresa, Cecilia, Catherine, Ursula.
She is intrepid, and in face of her nothing is mitigated.
When I arrive at the church, there is nobody else. I’m alone and I hang the tenda, folded as it was four times over itself on the counter, on the wrought iron railing which surrounds the Compianto group at the level of my knees.
There I wait. It crosses my mind that a tenda, as well as being a blind for keeping sunlight out, may also be one for keeping grief in, and for cultivating determination.
After some time, I leave the church of Santa Maria della Vita. The hurricane it contains never blows itself out. Outside the evening is peaceful. People are discussing tomorrow’s weather. I enter the Pavaglione shopping centre, for I have a premonition. There is a certain place where two arcades cross under a dome. In the corners of this space are tall pilasters. Pigeons often fly through there. The sparrows don’t come because there are no tables with people eating. It’s a place of passage. Perhaps when the Pavaglione was used, as an indoor food market, it was the quietest place. Anyway there’s an acoustic phenomenon. Which might be called ‘the whispering shout.’
If you stand against a particular pilaster and look diagonally across the octagon to the corresponding one on the other side, and if somebody happens to be standing there, you can talk to them, and they can talk to you, and your voices will be very distinct and loud, however many people are passing between you, and nobody else will hear your words. The idea of a secret is stood on its head. To share a secret here you move far apart, the words resound in public, and only the two of you hear them.
My premonition is that if I wait by one of the pilasters in question, he may come.
I wait for what seems a long while. It’s not that with age I have become more patient. I’m as impatient as I was when I was eleven; it’s simply that I believe in time less. A dog comes up to me wagging its tail. Dogs in Bologna are rare. The dog’s mistress scolds it, frowns at me and walks on, remembering, and at the same time fatally forgetting, her youth.
Suddenly he’s there. He’s perspiring. He has no jacket. His hands are gently clasped behind his back. He knows about the invisible acoustic telephone. He speaks with the quiet confidence of somebody who, apparently talking to himself, knows he will be heard.
Don’t forget, martyrs are ordinary people, they are never the powerful. Afterwards, a little power may accrue because of the example they’ve set. An example sustaining thousands of little hopes. Little hopes like the pursuit of little pleasures.
He mops his brow.
It’s only under this dome in the Pavaglione that we can talk of such paradoxes. Who would ever dream of putting martyrs and Blue Mountain coffee side by side? Yet they are closer than the moralists pretend, very close.
He peers through his glasses at me.
Martyrs are enviable. They’re to be pitied for the pain they suffer, for at one moment it is pain, very harsh pain. Yet they are also enviable.
I nod.
They have learnt how to be touched-that is the special gift of martyrs, warriors never learn it.
One of the buttons of his white shirt is undone and he does it up with his right hand without glancing at it, whilst continuing his whispering.
They know before they die that their life has served for something. Many would envy that.
Even if the cause they believe in was lost? I ask.
I believe so, yes. Anyway I’m not sure history has winners and losers any more than justice does. Martyrs die to have a home everywhere. That’s why they are honoured by the poor. When they are honoured in palaces, the martyrs, they revolt and disappear-leaving behind only their relics.
He takes off his spectacles and wipes them on a handkerchief he takes from the breast pocket of his shirt.
Surely the little pleasures, I reply, belong not to death but to life.
So does martyrdom. He says this as if he wants me to hear every letter of the words. It’s the coincidence of opposites. Amongst martyrs, and in the pursuit of little refined pleasures, there is something of the same defiance, and of the same modesty. At a different level naturally. But the coincidence remains. Both defy the cruelties of life.
You make me think of a painting by Caravaggio.
What of?
The martyrdom of St Ursula.
His laughter fills the dome, and nobody apart from me hears it. People are walking faster before the shops shut.
Ursula is rumour from beginning to end. He opens both palms in a gesture of humility and resignation. Street gossip. The woman lived in the 3rd century and her story was only told in the 9th. Some respect for the facts. At the end of the 4th century, a basilisk near Cologne was being repaired and the masons discovered a mass grave, all of them women, said to be virgins. They carved an inscription without citing a name or date. Four centuries pass, and along comes a storyteller. This storyteller finds the name of Ursula on a grave somewhere else. The grave of a child, who had died aged eight. Misreading the Roman numerals, he further proposes that Ursula, who has become overnight the daughter of the King of England, was accompanied on a pilgrimage by eleven thousand other virgins! There were understandably not enough ships for them to cross the Channel. So the ships had to be built. Whilst waiting, the women themselves learnt to sail and to become intrepid sailors. They crossed the Channel together, they sailed up the Rhine as far as Basel, and from there they walked over the Alps to Rome.
He shakes his head and waits, and we both watch the people passing through the arcade.
It was on their return journey that disaster befell them. Not far from Cologne they fell into the hands of Attila and his thugs and all of them who resisted were massacred.
He passes his thumb slowly along his lower lip.
There have always been rumours. They’re inevitable. They help us to come to terms with what is forcefully denied and may be true.
He dabs at his mouth with his handkerchief. When he takes it away, his mouth is smiling.
So be it. Bologna! Bologna! Near the Porta S. Vitale there’s a bar called the Bocca d’Oro, where they serve, if you insist on the one made by the capo’s mother, the best limoncello you’ve ever tasted. It promises everything.
Only the pilaster now. He’s gone. In my ears only the sounds of the city.
1.Martin Luther King, JR.·Letter from Birmingham Jail
2.Allen Ginsberg·Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward That Deathchamber
3.Daphne du Maurier·The Breakthrough
4.Dorothy Parker·The Custard Heart
5.Three Japanese Short Stories
6.Ana?s Nin·The Veiled Woman
7.George Orwell·Notes on Nationalism
8.gertrude Stein·Food
9.Stanislaw Lem·The Three Electroknights
10.Patrick Kavanagh·The Great Hunger
11.Danilo Ki?·The Legend of the Sleepers
12.Ralph Ellison·The Black Ball
13.Jean Rhys·Till September Petronella
14.Franz Kafka·Investigations of a Dog
15.Clarice Lispector·Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady
16.Ryszard ·An Advertisement for Toothpaste
17.Albert Camus·Create Dangerously
18.John Steinbeck·The Vigilante
19.Fernando Pessoa·I Have More Souls Than One
20.Shirley Jackson·The Missing Girl
21.Four Russian Short Stories
22.Italo Calvino·The Distance of the Moon
23.Audre Lorde·The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House
24.Leonora Carrington·The Skeleton’s Holiday
25.William S.Burroughs·The Finger
26.Samuel Beckett·The End
27.Kathy Acker·New York City in 1979
28.Chinua Achebe·Africa’s Tarnished Name
29.Susan Sontag·Notes on‘Camp’
30.John Berger·The Red Tenda of Bologna
31.Fran?oise Sagan·The Gigolo
32.Cyprian Ekwensi·Glittering City
33.Jack Kerouac·Piers of the Homeless Night
34.Hans Fallada·Why Do You Wear a Cheap Watch?
35.Truman Capote·The Duke in His Domain
36.Saul Bellow·Leaving the Yellow House
37.Katherine Anne Porter·The Cracked Looking-Glass
38.James Baldwin·Dark Days
39.Georges Simenon·Letter to My Mother
40.William Carlos Williams·Death the Barber
41.Betty Friedan·The Problem that Has No Name
42.Federico García Lorca·The Dialogue of Two Snails
43.Yuko Tsushima·Of Dogs and Walls
44.Javier Marías·Madame du Defand and the Idiots
45.Carson McCullers·The Haunted Boy
46.Jorge Luis Borges·The Garden of Forking Paths
47.Andy Warhol·Fame
48.Primo Levi·The Survivor
49.Vladimir Nabokov·Lance
50.Wendell Berry·Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer
[1]South Croydon，伦敦南部市镇。（以下若无特别说明，均为译者注。）
[2]Pelmanism，二十世纪上半叶在英国流行的一种记忆训练体系。——编者注
[3]原文为法语：par excellence。
[4]原文为法语：Bien s?r。
[5]原文为意大利语：la proxima volta，规范拼写为la prossima volta。
[6]意大利语，意为“窗帘”。——编者注
[7]她们都是被基督教封圣的殉道者。
[8]Basilica，古罗马的一种建筑形式，其平面呈长方形，外侧有一圈柱廊，主入口在长边，短边有耳室，后来的教堂建筑即源于巴西利卡。——编者注
