157 pages
Author�s
note:
This is a novel. It is the story of a young man
and his dreams of coming to grips with his meaningless life. His name is
Sebastian. The events take place in the labyrinthine Historic Center of Rome at
the end of the II Millennium.� It begins
with an event that shocks Sebastian out of his deep-seated hopelessness and
urges him to search for his place in life through some heroic action. For if he
vaunts his outsider status, he dreams of somehow of finding a way out of his
labyrinth.
It is the story of one representative of the
uprooted generations that began appearing throughout the world in great numbers
after World War II. People with no sense of homeland. No sense of belonging. No
sense of time. Past, present and future are elusive concepts for them. Unlike
expatriates whose constant dream is to return home, the uprooted, the
deracinated, the rootless, have no true concept of a native land. They
integrate quickly in diverse countries and societies and they speak a language
of placelessness, but ultimately they feel like outsiders everywhere. Neither
foreigners nor natives, they are eternal hybrids.�
The story takes place against a background of
the political terrorism that has plagued Italy and other countries in the
aftermath of the explosions of 1968. Two terrorisms emerged in Italy, Germany
and France: the left-wing terrorism of disillusioned young people who demand a
real revolution to obtain �everything here and now�; the right-wing terrorism
of the sons of European Fascism-Nazism who dream of the past. In most cases the
terrorist organizations were eventually infiltrated and manipulated by secret
services or became criminal associations. The events here are imaginary
although former terrorists, romantic nostalgics like Sergio, and their heirs
regularly raise their heads and dream of old glories.
It is also the story of the relationship
between Sebastian and Luca, the former theoretician of left-wing terrorism who
is above all part of Italian society and of his era. Each of them searches for
sustenance in the other: Sebastian in his desire to emerge into the real world;
Luca in his attempt to understand the internationalism he has always preached.
I began this novel in 1995 to tell the story of
the rootless ones. Dissatisfied with the first draft, I rewrote the entire
story the following year. That too I put aside when I left Italy for Mexico.
Finally, toward the end of the year 2000, I rewrote the novel again, this time
giving more importance to the Sebastian-Luca relationship and to the background
of political unrest and the role of the secret services.
I believe it is an interesting story, a story
worth telling. There are many Sebastian�s around. And more former and active
terrorists than one could even imagine.
On a September afternoon heavy under humid
winds blowing northwards from the Sahara, Sebastian Stone was buying his ticket
at the English-language cinema in an old quarter across the river when he heard
gunshots. He rounded the corner on the run and stopped short alongside a
crumpled body lying on the cobblestones. His first thought was that he had
stumbled onto a film set. But then he saw the puddles of dark blood spreading
over the stones.
He stared at the man standing some ten
meters away, his legs spread, his chin squared, his head lowered. The big man
was holding a pistol in two hands and pointing it at him.
I yelled halt but he didn't stop,� the
vigilante shouted to the people gathered at the scene near the church of Santa
Maria In Trastevere. �He robbed that girl over there.� He was yelling for
everyone to hear, waving his pistol toward a blond girl in a skimpy dress
standing near the church. �I saw him do it.�
Two seconds. The time to blink, and the
boy was dead. Another purse-snatcher was stretched out on the stones next to
his overturned motorbike.
"What the fuck do you want!" the
policeman shouted, pointing his pistol at Sebastian and collecting his courage.
Sebastian�s eyes were riveted on the boy's
body. It was beginning to shrink. A wave of nausea rushed over him. He felt the
blood drain from his face and his stomach turn inside out.
He stared down at the gray face of the
dark-haired boy lying on his back. His mouth was open as if to cry. The red
puddle surrounding him was spreading over the stones toward Sebastian�s dirty
boots. He looked so terribly alone.
�Did you see something?� snarled the
policeman. His broad face had reddened and his eyes bulged as he moved forward,
now with a hint of swagger. Sebastian�s sloppy dress and dirty blond hair too
long for the policeman's tastes seemed to manifest that he was
accomplice-ally-friend of the dead scum on the stones. Scowling under his dark
eyebrows and his hairy chest exposed under a tan shirt opened half way down,
the cop looked like a cornered wild boar.
Sebastian stared at his assailant's hands.
He was now holding the pistol in his right hand while with the fingers of his
left hand spread wide he had cupped his crotch in a half lascivious, half
child-like gesture.
�What're you gaping at, ragazzo?
Move on. Get out of here, or I'll take you in. You're obstructing justice.�
Obstructing justice? He was just going to
the movie. He didn't even want to be a spectator. The maddened cop now
dominated the piazza. Sebastian backtracked to the corner, his heart pounding,
his face red from agitation. It was those assassins hands that were so
terrible. And the reddened Sanpietrini cobblestones.
Betranced bystanders stood motionless.
Silence reigned. He took one last look toward the scene, turned, and went back
to the Cinema Pasquino. That unmistakable metallic tat-tat-tat was still
resounding in his brain. The boy's gray face was before him. Red blood. Dark
death red on the gray-black stones. Blood on stones. Blood and stones.
On the piazza, darkness. In the cinema,
blackness like the death outside. Black like the cobbles. Black, he thought,
like the spectral silhouettes of heads stationary against the rising and
dimming lights from the screen. Pale strange faces along the back row were
motionless. Laughter and back slapping on the screen. The senseless film before
him, its frames edited, cut, ordered, registered � while they were carrying
away the frail body in a black sack. The kid was no more. On his motorbike one
minute, the next sinking into Rome�s black stones. Into a stone grave. No more
worries about his daily dose. No more hunting for victims, no more fear and
terror and pounding heart. His life had been nothing. His death had no
significance. Murdered for snatching a worthless necklace from the neck of a
blond tourist.
Time had stopped. He knew he had stood at
the center of time. That instant of the flash of the gun was an eternity. Yet
it was nothing.
The next afternoon he retraced his steps.
Again he stood where he had stood under the cop's threats. He circled the spot
the body had lain. Nothing of the boy remained, not even traces of blood on the
dirty cobbles. He had vanished. Yet for a moment the
outline of the crumpled body on the stones flashed through his mind as in
isolated, slow motion film frames. The way one thin arm lay crossed over his
chest, his polo shirt blood-soaked, his hair long and curly. For that moment
the memory, the image of the memory - or the memory of the image - was his.
Two days later he was back in Trastevere,
sitting on the shaded terrace at the caf� on the opposite side of the piazza,
facing the portico of the church he had always loved. He was reading clippings
from the Messaggero and La Repubblica about the shooting of a
16-year old purse-snatcher, a Trastevere boy named Pierluigi.
Looking toward the death site, squinting
his eyes and trying to conjure up again the outline of the body, he started: the
elusive image of the boy on the stones was fading. Nearly gone. Again he had
been deceived by slippery memory.
The big policeman was well known on the
square, he read. The cop was known as a bully here in Trastevere where he had
grown up. Like Pierluigi. Probably they had known each other, the executioner
and his victim. One reporter wrote that the policeman�s elementary school
teachers had predicted that that boy would become a criminal. To impress people
in the caf� where Sebastian was now sitting he always carried his pistol in his
belt, pulling it out and waving it around like a flag. Had Pierluigi seen it
too, the pistol that killed him?�
The wary waiter on the caf� terrace
shrugged his shoulders and refused to comment on the cop's character. �Non
lo conosco,� he lied. I don't know him.
�See nothing, hear nothing, know nothing,�
Sebastian murmured. Rigid, motionless, his lips pursed, he contemplated the
Madonna mosaic on the facade of Rome's oldest Christian church on the opposite
side of the piazza - and he felt deluded by her promise.
All those times he had sat around the
fountain in the middle of this piazza, joking with the others, smoking pot and
drinking beer, the Madonna and the enigmatic women carrying lamps in their
outstretched hands frescoed on the wall over the portico and the row of statues
of cardinals along the edge of the overhead balcony had promised him their
sacred protection: shelter for him and the neo-hippies and the drug addicts who
congregated at the fountain, for the vagabonds who lived on the piazza, for the
black Africans who bought and sold anything, for the gays of the quarter, even
those with AIDS, who mingled promiscuously with the others, for the furious
motorcyclists, and for the other outsiders who met here under the shadow of the
ancient Romanesque bell tower. Superstitions, lingering Catholic culture, black
magic? They had believed, Pierluigi and all those disparate members of the
motley group, that for the outcast Piazza Santa Maria di Trastevere was the
safest spot in all of Rome. A haven, a refuge.
We all deserve one, a vagabond philosopher
from Turin preached to the others. A place to pull ourselves together, to find
ourselves again.
Even though Rome is not a poetic city,
this piazza had its poetry - like many of the city's singular squares. Too
ribald, too crass, Rome is too cynical to be poetic, too aggressive and too menefreghista,
devil-may-care. Too greedy for poetry.
Unlike grandiose Paris with its unbounded
perspectives and panoramas, Sebastian�s Rome was tight and closed, mysterious
and arcane. Its short streets, narrow and dark, suddenly, miraculously,
unfolding onto magnificent intimate piazzas, each secluded and
contained. In Rome, from one instant to the next, you step from a cobbled
alley, twisting and curving, black and sunless, onto a dazzling piazza bathed
in sunshine - each time you wonder where it materialized from. The piazza!
Where he'd learned to ride bikes and motor scooters. Where the kids of the
quarter brawl and love.
Each piazza like an inviting salon.
Protective like a homey oasis. A zona franca, a free zone, for the
little man in opposition to caesars and popes and foreign oppressors. Where
secrets abound, while everything is hidden from the eye until it leaps out to
astonish you.
Even if feminine, Rome is not delicate.
More than indifferent and oblivious, she's hard, brutal, cruel. Hard like the
stones from her subsoil, hard like her travertine stone and the volcanic tufa
of her great palazzos and the secular cobbles of her streets, maybe she is a
street-wise transvestite.
The tragedy here, Sebastian came to
realize as he reconstructed the drama over and over, was not only that of
Pierluigi, but of the stupid cop: he wasn't just cruel but also brutal. He'd
wanted the sensation of killing. Now he would feel the passion of that instant
the rest of his life. The boy was his sacrificial victim; he died in vain.
�While I failed miserably.��
�How could I just go to the movie
afterwards as if nothing extraordinary had happened? So what if I reported it
as a murder at police headquarters? What did I expect anyway? A reward? They
just buried my charge in their files. I played no role at all. Not even as a
witness.�
About the author:
Gaither Stewart left journalism three years ago in order to write fiction full-time. Originally from Asheville, North Carolina, he has lived most of his life in Europe, chiefly in Germany and Italy. For many years he was the Italian correspondent of the Rotterdam daily newspaper, ALGEMEEN DAGBLAD. His has been a varied life: from university studies in political science and Slavistics in the United States and Germany, to intelligence officer in Europe, to field correspondent for European and American radios, to public relations for Italian corporations, to full correspondent for a major European newspaper. His journalistic stories have appeared in the press Of West and East Europe. Now during the last year his fiction has appeared In a number of English language literary publications, including the SouthernCross Review. His first book, "The Russian Flask", is also on the SCR e-book list. Gaither lives with his wife, Milena, in the hills of north Rome.
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