The Maze of the Past

by Albin Zollinger

translator: Michael Wooff

part 1

Two young men from Germany had received as a reward for passing their law exams an all expenses paid trip to Rome. What attracted them there was not so much the fame of the Eternal City as the simple fact that it was far from home and, not least, that they were curious to see the new Caesar, Il Duce, whose deeds they admired.

They were law students, and not especially appreciative of art, but were willing to devote to it the strictly requisite amount of time that their Germanness necessitated in order to treat it both prudently and thoroughly and miss no opportunity to educate themselves. They stood around in museums and galleries with their arms folded and illuminated from above by light that shone through glass.

They were somewhat at a loss as to what they should make of things, respectfully morose, exchanging with each other knowing looks and, having done what they thought was expected of them, snorted with laughter at their long-repressed jokes in front of marble portals.

They pulled down their hats, the better to face the weather. There was a wind blowing here in the clearings between walls. They were overlooked by the Campagna, a blueness of ponds, and the country’s history. A past of soldiers singing, and the flags of Garibaldi lay oddly over everything, over the red brick houses, on the sun-stricken shutters, on the straw that donkeys carried, in the voices of street traders, in the smells and the sounds. They loved Italy, loved the life there, the whole gamut of what it promised them, which they anticipated almost passionately after their imprisonment among statues.

They had also acquired the knack of not making do with just dreams. They would sample in the afternoon in a hostelry the delights of southern cuisine and think ahead pleasurably to the evening when they’d go out with their Roman girlfriends.

Prior to that, there was football, visiting barracks and riding schools and, if they were lucky, a glimpse of Mussolini in his Lancia car. They prepared their cameras, studied the maps in their Baedekers, smoked and drank Frascati. They also wrote postcards home, happy and exuberant, unaware that they would never see their home again.

Their daily preoccupation with old things had affected them inwardly without their noticing. They were full of the mossy ornaments of early Christian churches, grumpy with stale incense. They paid to see the quiet power emanating from the scenes of even more lasting events: they were shown the restraints St. Peter had been handcuffed with, touched the marble of a broken pillar where Christ had allegedly been scourged, and saw the Holy Stairs that had led once to the praetorium of Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem, now overlain by wooden ones in order to protect and preserve them.

Military marches, the pipe-and-drum bands of uniformed youth brought them back to an awareness of the present and of their own superiority to all this that had once been great but was now dead. “Of all these times, only ours is the one true reality,” they said to themselves.

They pined for a drink in a sylvan setting high on the Appian Way. They made their way there in a horse-drawn carriage and drank once more Frascati in an area so pleasant it could not be put into words, in which hens clucked and goats and lizards clambered over ancient debris. It occurred to them that the fashion for evoking the past in landscape art had something crepuscular and eternal in it.

They inwardly experienced all the poverty and dereliction they saw as strangely symbolized by the shapes of trees and clouds, the horns of rams and of thistles. Perhaps it was all derived from books, whose assertions they had grown up with. At all events, they could not conceal from themselves that a life that was difficult to grasp ran next to, adjacent to temporality, to writing and culture and existed outside of the bloodstream of humans.

As this insight led to jealousy and was a hindrance to joy, they sought to deny it. They talked about their girls. They delved with their looks in the magic domesticity of this land of olive trees, of gates in walls and paths. There came a twittering from orange groves, from invisible dwellings in a strangely Sundayish environment, carpeted in bushes and yet perceptibly open and neighbourly.

They were unanimous in declaring that the spirit of the past scented their present fragrantly and decided, there and then, to add to the long list of their Roman adventures so far that of going underground. They had thought to find an entrance to the catacombs in the crypt of a church and not here in the Roman countryside.

The two or three small chapels here looked, to all intents and purposes, seen from outside, merely like sheds erected to keep gardening tools in more than a reception area for the world-famous site of early Christian burials. “Let’s go and see how these ladies and gentlemen bedded down,” said the young men, and: “Look, we get a free candle so that we can proceed with these other tourists here into the underworld.”

The Roman priest, who was to act as guide for the group, gazed at them quietly and announced, after the two of them had had their fun, raising his voice to tell them repeatedly, in two or three languages, that they should stay together as a group at all times in order not to get lost. These underground passages went down into the ground for a distance of five kilometres. “Did you hear that? This place of pilgrimage is not without its dangers!” He spoke to them over his shoulder. “It’s a pilgrimage of glowworms,” said a voice behind him dreamily.

Hades smelt sandy and cold. Their lights fell on black, broken walls as they walked up and down, over steps and down slopes, turning into corners, narrow passages and cave-like extensions. “Look at all the graffiti they’ve left on the ceiling! But I want to see ossuaries. Where are the ossuaries? I want to see the bones of dead people. Somewhere down here there has to be one of those cute puppet theatres with skeletons dressed up to the nines. I want more for my money than a few measly children’s graves.”

All the Germans had seen so far were trough-shaped channels in the limestone tunnels on both sides of them containing only bones that had crumbled to bits. They picked them up, trying to imagine what they once must have been two thousand years ago. Christian boys, Christian girls, speaking Latin, objects of derision to a ruling elite.

Of all great ideas, only the caricature of misunderstanding has been retained by history. Rest in peace Fabricius and Tertula. You’ve left the world behind now. You no longer have a place in the sun like we do. By dint of our efforts to conquer gravity, we have aeroplanes now. There are no heights that we cannot aspire to.

Here, it is true, we shuffle like crabs in a hall of mirrors that shorten us and make us squat. Sometimes, in your society as in ours, there are ghosts of former selves, Fabricius and Tertula. We have ventured underground. Good luck to us. Miners, too, have their place in the great scheme of things.

Then they remembered their girls again. Hearing the words of the monk, they listened also to the promptings of the heart, where the glow of feeling ran amok, covering great distances out of and beyond the body. A bishop of Rome had celebrated masses in this prettily decorated underground chapel here. The thing was like a jewel box. In the meantime that bishop had joined the martyred ranks of saints.

On the Pincian Hill the pines bowed their heads as Livia and Maria stumbled out of the gardens of the Villa Medici to go to one of Rome’s hundred thousand anonymous wallpapered rooms to give themselves up to dizzying raptures. Our priest-guide gave to us a sort of sermon in which he compared these raptures to those of Christian mystics, for the fire of enthusiasm can be kindled by various fuels.

At the end of the day their love was not touched by genius. It was a worldly flame that died out with them, not like the dark oestrus of religious fervour that continued to live on the walls and the ceilings of churches, in hymns and in candles. There was a strong possibility that all that glowed had inestimable value for God.

Nothing new came to light. They had to stoop in order to negotiate the passages, lingered in front of epitaphs on graves and before grilles on side-streets. The ladies clustered round the friar with questions, which they used as an excuse to gaze into his good-looking eyes.

A window above them showed that they were once again approaching daylight. Noises from the world above the catacombs came down to them. A church they supposed must be that of Saint Sebastian began to take shape over their heads. Our two young men were suddenly ashamed of having tagged along so docilely. They wanted at least to be sure that they had left no stone unturned in their quest for knowledge when they finally emerged.

Laughing and joking, they walked away into the darkness, ever careful to follow familiar signs. At one point, in a moment of doubt, they headed towards the voices of the group and found themselves back at the skylight. The priest had moved on; only they could hear him.

“Look at this,” one of them remarked to his friend. “How curious! This cross has been painted on this wall in a temper like the symbol of our party back home sometimes is. A vicious pagan has eternalized his anger for posterity by doing this.”

“The path branches off to the left here. There are marks of footsteps in the sand.”

“There are marks of footsteps here too, but I don’t want to follow either of these paths.”

“They might be treacherous,” said his friend, who was keeping him company, nevertheless.

“We can’t go wrong. All these passages resemble one another. Somewhere they must all come out into daylight sooner or later.”

“Daylight is good. And what about the Pincian Hill?”

They laughed. “We don’t want to miss that. Isn’t the notion that the sun outside is going down now wonderful? If there were an evening storm now, we’d know nothing about it.”

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Proceed to part 2...