me and for Andrija who was rotting in my memories as he was decomposing in the earth, on weekends Ghassan and I got drunk—often he told me stories about the civil war in Lebanon, his own war, he was on the side of the Lebanese Forces, of course, on the side of the flag and the crucifix that was so similar to us Croats, he was sixteen at the fall of West Beirut, in 1982, when Intissar and the Palestinian fighters left Lebanon, Ghassan had thought the war was over, he had enlisted a few months later when the massacre had started up again, inspired by his elders who told him about the glorious years in the 1970s, when the other side was leftist, long-haired, and wore an upside-down Mercedes symbol for a badge, later the enemy was Druze, then Syrian, then Christian during the last great confrontation that put the mountain to fire and sword for nothing, the city was burning, he said, the bombings were more intense than ever, Geagea’s Lebanese Forces were fighting against General Aoun, in that mixture of pride, power and money that summarized his country so well: he might have fought against Marwan, Ahmad and Intissar, maybe even against Rafael Kahla the author of the story, who knows, every time I went to Beirut I thought about Ghassan’s stories, and the new contacts in my new profession told me more stories of war and espionage, Lebanon is a market stall by the sea, said Kamal Jumblatt, and everything’s for sale, everything’s for sale, especially information and the lives of the undesirable, Kamal the father of Walid Jumblatt prince of the Druzes the funniest the cleverest the cruelest of the lords of the Lebanese war, secluded in his palace in Mukhtara to escape the Syrian bombs and the car bombs, Walid the killer of Christians from the Shouf is a witty, cultivated and very wealthy man, his warriors were the toughest, the boldest, the craziest, the bloodiest, they infuriated their leader because they were incapable of marching in step, but they had no equals in leaving 200 dead on a village square in less time than it takes to say so, and in that tiny country where everything is known or everything happens among family they tell the most unlikely stories about the warlord Walid, they make you smile and tremble at the same time, like all of Lebanon, country of laughs and shudders: one night he invited a cousin and his wife Nora to dinner, up there in his mountain, and at the end of the meal, as the couple was about to leave, Walid, without even getting up from the table they say, told his relative that he could leave but that his wife was staying, and so there were two possible solutions, either she got an immediate divorce, or she became a widow, this Helen of Phoenicia, always the passion for the wives of others, just as frequent among the kings of Lebanon as those elsewhere, witness Ghazi Kanaan the Syrian colonel who used all the terror of power in Damascus not only to get rich, but also to sleep with well-placed ladies in high Lebanese society, and they say—of Kings, of Warriors—that he was capable of summoning a minister in the middle of the night and telling him to send his mistress straightaway, so she could come give him head, him the leader of the Syrian forces, his revolver at his minister’s temple: ogres want everything, take everything, eat everything, power, money, weapons, and females, in that order, and these stories of monsters reminded me of my own ogres, Serbian, Croatian, who could unleash all their rage and quench all their thirst for mythic humanity, violence and desire, these stories were the delights of the man in the street, the children, the meek, happy to see the powerful get humiliated in turn in front of someone more powerful, lose their honor their wives as the poor had lost their houses their children or their legs in a bombardment, which after all seemed less serious than dishonor and humiliation, the defeat of the powerful is tremendous, beautiful and loud, a hero always makes noise when he collapses, a hundred kilos of muscle strike the ground in one huge dull thud, the public is on its feet to see Hector tied to the chariot, see his head wobble and his blood spurt, the ogre conquered by an even bigger ogre: Ghassan couldn’t help but be fascinated by these heroes, the Jumblatts, Kanaans, or Geageas, admire their feats of arms and their escapades that he recounted like good jokes, slapping his thighs, smiling from ear to ear, over a spritz or a Campari and soda on one of those Venetian squares that themselves seemed the opposite of all violence, on the other side of the world, a piece of history floating on the motionless lagoon, one of the centers of the political and economic Mediterranean cut off from reality and eaten away by tourists as well as by vermin and moss, slowly but surely, the army of underlings has taken the city, they stroll among the dead palaces, invade the sumptuous churches, happy to contemplate the corpse of the giant up close, the empty shell of the dried-out snail—with Ghassan we were absolutely insensitive to all the beauties of Venice, he the emigrant, the worker, I the depressive who in La Serenissima probably appreciated only the silence of the deserted streets invaded by night and fog, disoriented, incapable of making a step towards firm land, Marianne had to leave me one fine morning on the Ponte delle Guglie for me to wake up, we were coming back drunk from a night of endless talk, Ghassan and I, it must be six or seven in the morning, I almost haven’t seen Marianne at all the two or three preceding days, she in light and I in darkness and there she was on the bridge, in the grey dawn, pajamas on under her coat, her hair loose, pale, rings under her eyes, and when I go up to her worried she lands me a furious kick right in the balls which doubles me over cuts off my breath and she disappears, she leaves right in front of the dumbfounded eyes of Ghassan who doesn’t even dare laugh for a few minutes, astonished as I clutch my abdomen my head against the parapet not understanding what’s just happened not realizing that my aching testicles are sounding the alarm, that this unexpected shot from Marianne is propelling me out of Venice, I’ll never see her again, she took the first train, she left, and I did too, shaken all of a sudden by her despair the pain makes me come to my senses, at daybreak, Ghassan stunned watches Marianne walk away without believing it, what was she doing outside at that hour half dressed I guess she was looking for me, she was looking for me to tell me she was leaving, it was over, she couldn’t say anything she aimed her shoe at my privates I hurt all the way up to my ears, my eyes full of tears, I took note: I took note, I woke up, shaken, pulled out of waiting and drunkenness, I packed my bags in the shadow of Marianne’s vanished perfume, Achilles the proud warrior gathers his spoils, his shining greaves, and his bronze weapons into hollow vessels, I said goodbye to Ghassan knowing full well I probably would never see him again and three days later, more than six months after my arrival, I took a train almost like this one headed north passing through Milan: there are geographical points about which you realize, once the route has been traveled, that they were crossroads, cruxes perhaps, detours, required passages without your being able to guess—trains and their blind progress always lead you there—that they harbor an important part of the journey, that they define it as well as contain it, modest, those train stations you travel through without ever going outside them, for me it’s the Milan station, a city actually unknown but where, at every change of my existence, I passed through to get into a new train, from Paris to Zagreb, from Venice to Paris, and today from Paris to Rome to go deliver—like any merchandise, pizza, flowers—fifty-year-old secrets and other more recent ones to trembling prelates, in return for hard cash, I set the amount at $300,000, thinking that the irony wouldn’t escape men of the Church, thirty pieces of silver, they didn’t breathe a word, agreed without a murmur, without daring to bargain with the sinner over the price of treason, Rome is still Rome, whoever its master is, I turn round in my seat and close my eyes, Milan, at every bend in life, without ever really pausing there: I’ve never seen the Duomo, or da Vinci’s Last Supper, or the Victor Emmanuel Gallery, or the gallows where they exposed the dead Mussolini, hanging by the ankles like a common pig, giving his porcine face the homage due to it, that face with the immense forehead that today adorns so many weird objects in all the markets in Italy, T-shirts aprons playing cards penknives with engraved handles collectible matchboxes alcohol flasks or soccer balls, the economy of fascism seems to be doing well and just recently I saw, after a meeting at the Vatican, on the other side of the river, on People’s Square, a Mussolini ceremony in proper form, for some kind of general election maybe, the new fascists were there with the old fascists, brown shirts, black, songs flags arms raised eagles unfurled Latin inscriptions shouts into microphones authoritarian loudspeakers violence cars swerving tires screeching around the square and immediately I thought of Croatia of course but especially of the end of Salò, the Italian Social Republic, worn away little by little by the partisans who themselves were exterminated en masse from Bolzano to Mauthausen, sent by train beyond the Brenner Pass to die in Teutonic land, whenever the SS didn’t bother finishing them off themselves by clubbing them to death in cells from La Risiera to Trieste—trains carry soldiers and the deported, murderers and victims, weapons and ammunition and for now in the darkness of the countryside that I guess at by dint of the movements of the car behind my closed eyes,
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