Satyr Square: A Year, a Life in Rome - Hardcover

1 ONE YEAR OF SOLITUDE

There were a hundred and three steps up to my top-floor apartment in the Piazza dei Satiri. They rose in a long stone spiral said to have functioned as a military watchtower for several centuries before the building it now served was constructed as an afterthought to it. At this moment, within days of my arrival, I had not yet counted the steps, of course. That act of classification would only come months later, born of a cross between exhilaration and muscle strain as I hefted home the complete works of Pliny the Elder, or else of my determination to master the strains of life in Rome, perhaps inspired by a notable success, or failure, in the archives.

The steps were innumerable and the memory of hauling upward a taxiful of excess baggage still fresh. I had mastered nothing about the route homeward except that the man who drove me from the airport, after gamely consenting to help with the suitcases once he was tipped in lire sporting many zeros, had taught me a new vocabulary word. As we wheezed our way upward, he gave me to understand that we were passing one, two, three, four, and arriving finally at my—fifth—pianerottolo, or landing.

Eager to increase my word power, I had just tried this expression out on a friendly shopkeeper—I was choosing between the purchase of a TV and the rental of a piano, the one project ultimately postponed, the other abandoned—but where I expected to impress with my conquest of domestic Italian, I was faced rather with philological comeuppance. Yes, he said, you could describe the space in front of my door that way, but mostly the word was used to talk about neighborly proximity, to establish your bond with the people next door by saying that they lived on the same pianerottolo. Like so many words, it seemed to describe a thing but really described a relation. My building, an accidental composite, now rather dilapidated, of separate constructions from the first, the eleventh, and the seventeenth centuries, had only one apartment per floor. Without a close neighbor, I could have no pianerottolo.

Perhaps it was the conversation with the piano man that inspired the tiny act of madness I was about to commit on this upward climb. Then, too, it was dark (the staircase was never well lit), and I was as yet so far from having a Roman routine that I had not even learned to count landings, let alone steps.

At all events, on this particular late afternoon I found myself well above street level in front of a door inside my building, poised to enter. Why I did not simply extract the keys from my pocket I am not sure. It can’t have been that I forgot about them: their boxy, exotic shapes produced a vexing bulge in my clothing that I never learned to smooth. Let us just say, and not for the last time, that I was slightly disoriented.

What I did was, I knocked on my own door.

A voice responded, "Chi è?" (Who’s there?), and I said, "Son io" (It’s me). A completely unremarkable exchange. Except that there was no one in my apartment; there could be no one in my apartment; in my whole adult life I had lived with no one. Furthermore, it was especially impossible for there to be anyone in this apartment, since I knew not a living soul when I came to Rome, nor had I since my arrival met anyone to whom, judiciously or injudiciously, I might have offered a set of those cumbersome keys. I had exchanged a life without a partnership for a life without even an acquaintanceship.

The mystery, I suppose, is not much of a mystery: I was intruding on the siesta of the elderly lady who lived at the fourth, rather than the fifth, pianerottolo. No surprise that she would react to a stranger by asking "Who’s there?"; but whom did I think I was talking to when I replied, "It’s me"? And what was I to say when she very reasonably responded, "Me who?"

I covered my tracks by blurting out some hastily concocted form of "Please excuse me, I’ve made a mistake, I’m at the wrong door." Ho sbagliato porta, ho sbagliato porta, I repeated to myself upstairs after consulting dictionaries and phrase books, though I never again needed to say it. And from then on, I learned that to get home in the Piazza dei Satiri, I had to climb until there were no more neighbors and no more stairs to climb.

Yet the whole episode is not so strange when you realize that I came to Rome precisely to hear voices. In fact, I had been taking part in displaced conversations for a long time. When I taught Hamlet, students eager to tackle existential paradox had to endure my endless riffs on the play’s first two lines, in which a lonely soldier guarding the dark battlements of Elsinore cries out, "Who’s there?" only to be answered by another soldier, newly arrived for his watch, who responds, in effect, No, you’re the one who’s supposed to answer me. Who’s there, indeed.

But I wasn’t in Rome to hear the voices of Danish soldiers, or Shakespeare, or even Dante, much as they would keep resounding in my head, even here. Poets’ voices, I had come to feel, were too easy to hear, which, oddly enough, meant that their voices were being drowned out by too many professors—my colleagues—speaking on their behalf. I came to Rome to hear voices hoarse from much longer silence, the voices of material objects, statues of marble and bronze that had lived the public and private life of ancient Rome, then been buried under a thousand years of decomposing civilization only to reappear in the Renaissance, anonymous and mutilated, speechless and demanding to be heard.

Take those satyrs who had given my piazza its name. All the neighborhood regulars, like the elderly proprietor of the ballerina-friendly restaurant who held court outdoors in bathrobe and slippers, or the young go-getter whose paint shop permanently displayed a handwritten sign reading TODAY: GLUE, could tell you that twin statues of satyrs had been dug up right here five hundred years ago. I happened to know these guys. Leering, paunchy, goat-legged, and, as statues go, well hung, they were now tucked inconspicuously among more eloquent antiquities in front of the Capitoline Museum. Yet if you listened carefully, they might tell quite a story. Once, they had supported a doorframe in Pompey’s Theater; a millennium later, detached and armless, they became prized collectibles. Pristine in 44 B.C., they witnessed the assassination of Julius Caesar; eroded in 1513, they were carried like totems to celebrate the inauguration of fat, art-loving Pope Leo X. I was proud to live at the sign of such a sexy pair, even if they were both carrying filigreed marble fruit baskets tucked between their horns.

Alas, it was my job to listen to them even more carefully. Once I did that, I discovered that my little satyr community wasn’t entirely authentic. No document records where these statues were found in the 1400s, and it’s only in recent times that they have become associated with my home square. Worse than that, this bit of turf was given names that sound like satrio and atri (which bespeak no satyrs) as early as the Middle Ages, long before such statues could possibly have been dug up. And when you come down to it, they’re not really satyrs, they’re fauns. Most likely, the story about the hunky eponyms is a nifty mythic back-formation invented around 1800, and the truth is, I live in the Piazza of the Theater, or the Piazza of the Atrium, or maybe even the Piazza of Satire. Only much later did I notice that it’s the cross street of my building, Via dei Chiavari, that is endowed with authentic sexy potential. Literally, it’s the street of key makers, but regular late-night guffaws from drunken young Romans suggest that chiavare, putting the key in the lock, has other idiomatic meanings. You have to listen to the voices of the living as well as the dead.

That takes a lot of practice, especially in an unfamiliar environment, and at this moment I was still being deafened by the reverberating sound of the voice in my own head. Within a very few days of arriving, I had perceived that my sabbatical in Rome meant one year of solitude. Like all such thunderblows, this realization came not from experiencing the dreaded condition itself, but from the efforts to stave it off.

Before leaving the States, I had—masochistically, as it turns out—cultivated circles of acquaintance among those who had spent research time in Rome. They all had their own nostalgias for bands of institutional camaraderie, and there were some diabolically effective storytellers among my informants. Even now I can recall the vicarious sensations of spending New Year’s Eve atop the American Academy or of engaging in coffee-room gossip sessions among the manuscripts at the Vatican Library as though they were taking place before my eyes. They never would take place before my eyes, as the storytellers themselves regretfully made clear. The awkward, unkempt Evanston antiquary whose whole life was a downhill slide compared with his year at the American Academy, the raven-haired Marxist beauty who had organized an ongoing international salon during break times among the medieval codices—these and others were haunting me as I did my lone shopping in the streets near my new house.

The day before, there had been a chance encounter with an art historian I knew only slightly, via a mutual friend with whom my relations were so pained as to be undiscussable. We sat in a café, I babbled like a madman for half an hour—released from utter silence—and then, looking for churches to which we might pay a learned visit, we combed the nearby streets. But we were in the midst of midday closure, and all we ended up doing was inventing a quattrocento artist named Divieto di Sosta (i.e., No Parking), a peripatetic muralist who never learned how to work in fresco. As we parted, she recalled that she had been invited to dinner with a professor at the University of Rome—he was connected to m...