The first approach he had was walking by distractedly, his gaze wandering around the room, catching glimpses of light touching white surfaces and shining just around the corner of his eye. Then, he saw him. He stopped, taking a few step backwards and then turning to look at him. The other had his face turned to the ground, his head a bit tilted to a side and was frowning ever so slightly that it was nearly imperceptible. Slowly, Erik took cautious steps, gaining the view of his face, of his eyes. But the look had faded from them long ago and now, staring back at him, there was no iris, no pupil, no color. Just unpolished white marble.
And yet, it was so alive he felt like he was being looked back.
Maybe a whole minute passed while they scrutinised each other.
Antinous.
He had big mournful eyes and looked terribly, tragically young. In front of them and what felt like judgment imposed upon him by the ghost before him he couldn’t dare to look away; he had to sustain it and to endure it. But how could he have helped looking at the full lips of the statue? Had they turned blue in the waters of the Nile? He was always moved by the story of the young man, as he was by the lives of many others that faced terrible destinies such as his; but he had a special place in his heart. He remembered first learning about him in a dusty library back home: a name only vaguely referred to when speaking about Hadrian, Emperor of Rome. He was 16 when he realized that this young man, Antinous, had loved and lived his love with the emperor. Erik used to imagine seas of sand in a faraway, hot land where the two of them rode their horses, no one but them; their dark skins shining under a warm sun and the nights passed embracing each other, enemies of cold and lonelyness. Then his fantasies upgraded by learning more and more. He understood that they were followed and admired, even if their relationship was no secret. He started imagining the wild lion hunt in Lybia – without even knowing what kind of country Lybia was, the name being only a label on his imaginary land where Antinous and Hadrian could love each other even then, millenia after their deaths. He thaught himself their story, everything there was to know. He forced himself to read about this boy’s death, drowned by accident right in front of Hadrian that, as always, was with him.
Erik felt his eyes judging him because this kind of story usually inspires young men: in a world where they are taught to believe there is only one way to be, there was someone, many years before their birth, that had comprehended that there were as many ways to be as there were people on the world. Erik should have read and understood that there was someone like him, someone he could aspire to be, someone that had his whole world in his hands. He should have taken his life into his control.
Instead, he had created a world of fantasy, in which people like them could live their lives in peace and decided to live in his other, real world. Somehow, he had concluded that his interest on the matter was purely historical, that no other pleasure derived from reading of these two men succeffuly hunting the Marousian lion and then tiredly hugging themselves to sleep. Somehow, Erik’s deception ran so deep that he had lived many years in his lie, forgetting about his fantasies and keeping himself content with the distant relationships he had managed to establish with the women he had known.
Somehow, Erik was nearly 40 and had two kids, but this was the first time in a very long time that he thought about that. Not that his unhappy marriage was something he could forget about – he had to come to terms with who he was, eventually. But the statue was making him remember how he could have done that and understood sooner – many years sooner. It was a reminiscence of an age long gone – with its first passions – and the synecdoche of all the time lost in his forgery.
Sorry for not undestranding – he thought – and for forgetting about you.
He looked away.
His steps were hurried now, out of that long white hall of marble and gold and out on the street. The Capitoline Museums were a labyrinth of rooms and exploding colors; a riddle he had to resolve to exit from them. A whole day had passed since his entrance there and now that he came out the light was dying out peacefully. The streets were still busy and he suspected they were going to be far into the night. He put his hands in his pockets and started walking. He didn’t know where to, but he still wasn’t in the mood of returning to the hotel. Plus, it was one of his last days in Rome and he wasn’t going to waste it. The summer had kicked in and it was an amazing one as well; you’d think that with a sun like the one that illuminated that city the heat would be unbearable. It was pleasant instead, and now that even that mild sun was gently disappearing – leaving behind fragments of the day in the forms of warm colors: stains of orange in a purple and blue sky – he wasn’t feeling neither hot or cold. It was just right. He had been in Rome for nearly a week, without a real reason behind it aside from taking a pause from it all. The divorce process had started and it was the hardest and more tiring thing he’d ever done.
The look in Magda’s eyes as he explained what had brought him to that conclusion – they could not be together anymore and not realizing it earlier was solely his mistake – would remain printed in his memory forever and even now, between those overlapping voices talking in a melodic way, over the screams of children that complained about their sore feet after a long day of walking, their little hands in their parents’, he could hear Magda’s cries of anger and pain against him. He still loved her and always had, just not the way he thought or he said he did. Not the way she thought he did. She was the mother of his children, but now her looks and words expressed only cold hatred towards him, nothing more, nothing less. He would still love her, he thought, looking at the Colosseum’s silhouette painting itself on the canvas of the setting sky. Forever. He was in via dei Fori Imperiali and the only thing he could think was that amidst all that beauty, what caught him more was the red that was imposing in the sky, so similar to her hair, so similar to his child’s hair. You can’t excape from yourself, he thought – bitterly realizing that even after reading all that literature that taught him so he had still done just that, for a half of his life. The columns of Caesar’s forum towered above him, projecting a dark shadow on the road. He heard someone playing. There were some stone benches under the roman pines, higher than the columns. They provided comfortable shadows on the benches during the day, but at that time the shadows were elongating as far as they could, leaving the space under them bask in the last ray of sunshine. He spotted the place from where he haerd the sound coming: there as an od busker with a guitar that was playing some sad sounding italian song. He actually knew a little bit of italian but couldn’t grasp the meaning of the words immediately. There, under the pines, he decided to sit. There wasn’t a free bench, so as he walked towards them he had to pick one. The choice didn’t take much of his thought: there was one where only one man was seating, giving him the shoulders; in front of it, the view of all the forums and what was behind it, a pulsing city that didn’t show the sign to stop in front of the night.
( Io dedico questa canzone
ad ogni donna pensata come amore
in un attimo di libertà
a quella conosciuta appena
non c'era tempo e valeva la pena
di perderci un secolo in più, sang the busker )
He seated down, feeling the chill of the cool rock touching his body and took his cigarette case from his pocket, cracking it open and bringing one of them to his mouth. He realized, far too late, that his lighter was in neither of them though – probably he had lost it during his composed flee from the museum, while he was far too distracted to notice something as small like that. « Scusi, ha un accendino? », he asked, with a painfully evident merican accent in his broke italian. The other man lifted his eyes from the book and smiled brightly before answering. Time decided to stop, even if for only a second. The person seated next to him must have had nearly his age, even if he seemed a little bit younger. His dark hair in fact was stained by light, streaked with grey, but it still preserved some of his original brunet colour. Erik could see the wrinkles around his eyes but the eyes themselves smiled and shined in the youthful and delighted way young boys’ eyes did; they looked like the eyes of a kid who has seen too much, still joyful and innocent but concealing something secret and unspeakable behind them. His lips, now bended in a light smile, were full and with the everchanging light of the sunset on them they showed a shade of pink he as sure he had never seen before. In his hands, hel carefully, there was a book by an Italian authour: Gli amori difficili, Difficut Loves. His fingers bended around it carefully and yet protective. The wave in his hair, the look in his eyes, his lips. Erik wish he could think he didn’t know why, but he could only have one word for that man: Antinous.
« Don’t worry about trying to speak what looks like Italian to you, not with me. I can garantee that I understand English far better », wasthe answer that Erik had waited for a time that seemed much longer than it actually was. « I’m afraid I can’t help you tough », added the stranger, not losing his amused smile.
( A quella quasi da immaginare
tanto di fretta l'hai vista passare
dal balcone a un segreto più in là
e ti piace ricordarne il sorriso
che non ti ha fatto e che tu le hai deciso
in un vuoto di felicità, sang the busker )
« Don’t worry », smiled Erik. « Reading in Italian, I see? You must speak much more fluently than I do. » The other shrugged. « Not really, but I surely am a good reader », he said, before lowering again his gaze towards the book. At that point Erik should have gotten up, looking for a lighter. But he remained there, his cigarette still between his lips. He pretended to look the sparks appearing one by one in the landscape, the streetlamps lighting up in Rome. But all his attention was dedicated to the man seated beside him. Erik tried to be honest ith himself: was he really so similar to Antinous, or was it only a projection born from the vision of the statue, early on? But really, maybe the answer was neither – maybe, the man on the bench was just similar to his Antinous, the man that he had forged and that had haunted his teenager imagination. Maybe only his lips, full and inviting, resembled a greek statue. Maybe the melancholy in his eyes somehow resembled the ambigous sadness in the marble. Now, the only sound he could hear were the pages turning, the stranger reading silently besides him.
( Alla compagna di viaggio
i suoi occhi il più bel paesaggio
fan sembrare più corto il cammino
e magari sei l'unico a capirla
e la fai scendere senza seguirla
senza averle sfiorato la mano, sang the busker )
In the birth of the night, in his fabricated silence, he imagined being surrounded by the sand of a distant land, alone with the stranger. He imagined the stranger turning his head and talking to him softly – saying tender, uncomprehensible words to his ear. The wind blowed softly on them, the stars shone so brightly he could clearly see the blue eyes of his Antinous shining in the dark, a smile of happyness on his face. Love, and just love, just that, was enough. Minutes, hours, days, years of their love. A lifetime. And then, when his Antinous would have left him too, he would have built statues to commemorate his beauty too. He would have made a deity out of him because he felt – he knew – that he was looking over him from the afterlife. And so that wavy hair would have appeared on the statues of Osiris, that big sad eyes on monuments of Baccus, that gentle face could have represented the gods – God – in all his almightyness, in all his highness, in all his inexplicable duty. For all that mattered was love, and so God was love too, and love could only be his Antinous. How he had dreamed of that, of Hadrian and Antinous in their stunningly beautiful fictional desert – but he had never allowed himself into his own fantasy, let alone another man. He let his mind slip from the dream into reality to catch another glimpse of the stranger. He looked intent, his face now serious or even worried with the events of the books. Erik noticed some freckles on his cheeks, now exposed under the light of a streetight.
( Immagini care per qualche istante
sarete presto una folla distante
scavalcate da un ricordo più vicino
per poco che la felicità ritorni
è molto raro che ci si ricordi
degli episodi del cammino, sang the busker )
No more than twenty minutes had passed when the stranger got up to his feet. Erik felt sudden panic. This image, this picture that navigated his head during that time had suddently started to vanish as fast as it had appeared and he felt like the face of the stranger had already started to melt, confusing its lines and colours with all the ones that were hidden in the back of his mind. He saw Antinous getting up from the sand and giving one last look at him before getting on his horse: he knew that the trip had no way back to him.
« Wait-! » His exclamation was accompanied with a quick movement of the hand, that was now wrapped on the other’s wrist. His questionable gesture was received with a surprised look, eyes widening and lips just a little bit parted.
« Yes? », asked the stranger. Later, Erik would have thought a lot about this insignificant reaction. Every time he remembered about it he asked himself what was hidden below that single, meaningles word. Sometimes, he thought that in the other eyes there was an expectation that he hadn’t detected on spot – that Antinous was expecting something from him. Maybe a name, or an invite. Maybe, for all the time he had thought about him, the stranger had thought about him too. Imagining them in a completely different world of his forgery, a distant shore or a cabin in the mountains, far away from everyone else, just the two of them. Other times he remembered as he believed it really went: the man was startled that Erik had called out to him so suddently after being silently sit next to him for nearly half an hour. But actually – who knew? What Erik could know though, was that being sure that the stranger had no expectation from him was the only way not to regret his course of action in any way. Because if one day he was to understand that actually what the stranger wanted was to hold him as he did, he would never forgive himself for what he had done after.
( Allora nei momenti di solitudine
quando il rimpianto diventa abitudine,
una maniera di viversi insieme,
si piangono le labbra assenti
di tutte le belle passanti
che non siamo riusciti a trattenere, sang the busker )
« Do you happen to know what the title of this song is? » Erik had hesitated and then, this was his answer. The busker was still near them, playing the same song over and over. The stranger smiled warmly and let his hand gently slide from his grip, their hands touching for just a second, his fingers passing on Erik’s and his eyes turned towards this quick and delicate movement. He lifted his glare and looked again in his eyes. This time, he was sure, there was something to his smile that he hadn’t been able to understand as fast as he should have: there was a shade of irony that had no meaning to him, in that moment.
« It’s Le passanti, by De André », he answered, before looking at him one last time, before turning himself and going away. Erik chased him till he could, trying not to loose him in the crowd; but at a certain point, his hair, his figure had been swallowed by the night and the people. He turned himself again towards the forum and put his hands in his pockets casually. His lighter, he noticed, was there. He was sure he had searched well before, but it really didn’t catch his attention – if not for the fact that, if he had noticed it, he would have nevere looked at the stranger. He lighted his cigarette and, looking at the lights of Rome and starting to ear its overwhelming sounds again, decided that he would listen to that song as soon as possible.
The Passerby, Fabrizio De André
I dedicate this song
to every woman thought of as a lover
in an instant of freedom,
to that one only just met -
there was no time and it was worth it
to lose ourselves for another century.
To that one almost imagined,
in such a hurry you saw her pass
from the balcony to a secret further on,
and you like to remember the smile
she didn’t make for you and that you decided for her
in an absence of happiness.
To the fellow traveler,
her eyes, the most beautiful scenery,
make the way seem shorter,
and hopefully you’re the only one to understand her,
and you drop her off without following her,
without having brushed against her hand.
To those who are already taken
and who, living in the disillusioned hours
with a man by now too changed,
left you, wasted folly,
to see the depths of the melancholy
of a desperate future.
Dear images for a few instants,
you'll all soon be a distant jumble,
climbed over by a memory more near.
However little happiness returns,
it is very rare that one remembers
the events along the way.
But if life stops helping you,
it is harder for you to forget
those happy glimpses
of kisses one dared not give,
of the occasions left waiting,
of the eyes never again seen.
Then in the moments of solitude
when regret becomes a habit,
a way of living together,
mourned are the absent lips
of all the beautiful passersby
we didn’t manage to not let go.