An affair in ruins
by JR Carpenter
[ fiction - june 04 ]
"O Lucky people, whose city already rises,"
Aeneas sighed as he looked across the rooftops.
The he went clean through the crowds and nobody saw him.
Vergil, The Aeneid
Square in one corner of the northwest pasture sat the ruins of a house. Ruins of ruins, the vestiges of a modest stone foundation, set so far back from the road that there must have been a different road long ago. How else would the inhabitants have made their way into town? How long had it taken for that family to age and fade, for the wooden walls to warp and sag and rot into oblivion? Inexplicably ancient, these mysteries seemed to me.
Our own farmhouse was newly built, fresh from the hands of my father: a cinder block basement, no roots in his root cellar. Along the north wall of the living room he installed floor to ceiling bookshelves, the rough planks a concession to my mother's books.
"They're only there for insulation," my father said, not cruel, but heartless.
I read in no particular order, so long as the shape of the book lent itself to the day's activity. The massive volumes of Will Durant's History of Civilization lay flat when opened; they could be read at the kitchen table while shelling peas. Vergil was pocket sized, easily smuggled out to the sunken, ruined foundation in the northwest pasture. In summer the air was cool down there, the walls thick with vegetation. No one thought to look for me in such an overgrown place. Only the cattle knew my clandestine destination as I passed among them, Aeneid in hand.
Winter was harder. I read covertly, flashlight under the quilts. Whichever book I took to bed, all night long I would imagine the north wind whistling in through the crack that I had made with my selection - a breech in my mother's wall of books, a book-shaped chink in my father's armor.
* * *
Once I had read the lot of my mother's books, I left the farm for Montréal. The University was hideously ugly. The art history classroom was hot and uncommonly dry. In the cramped, narrow rows of shabby auditorium seats, there was no room for extra books or bags or restless legs. At the front, a forlorn lectern poised at the edge of an expanse of hard, eggshell white, waiting wall.
The lights dimmed. Professor Azar's first slides were thrust ahead by the projectors. Light sliced though nervous, first semester air - a million specs of dust exposed. The slides advanced: the warm light, the dry earth and the intoxicating tones of the weathered stone of ancient Rome suspended in the projectors' firm trajectories.
Professor Azar would venture into the light, to point to some detail, to draw our attention to some historic trick of light playing itself out on the classroom wall. With the slightest touch of her hand, she would trace the contours of a volute, or lead us through a mythic narrative carved in bas-relief. The glare of the projectors' in her eyes her brow would furrow. Squinting, she'd smile blind and dazzling.
Histories stacked in stone would melt and bend across her body. Tons of travertine toyed with the hues of her complexion. Finely drawn architectural models became abstracted in the patterns of her dress. Entire frescos, only recently rescued from the obscurity of the centuries, were lost again in the dense blackness of her hair.
I took every class of hers that the syllabus had to offer: art, architecture, archeology. Layers of past landscapes became as confused as the contents of a slide carousel spilled onto the classroom floor. Lonely aqueducts meandered about in the fields of distant memory, another history written away in a corner of my mind. Broken villas situated themselves in the pastures of my parents' farm.
By day the Mont Royal disguised itself as any one of the seven ancient hills of Rome. In summer I climbed the mountain often - book in hand - in search of a cool place amid the vegetation, a quiet place to read. Professor Azar's Rome was always there, flickering in the view, a phantom image projected over the real city below. Evenings, I went to look for books from my mother's shelves - still there in the whirring, clicking jumble of my mind.
One sodden gray rush hour, I saw Professor Azar on the Sherbrooke Street bus. On the bus she was no Pompeii wall painting, no profile fit for an Etruscan urn. Young, smallish, jostled, weighed down by a waterlogged coat. Someone called out to her: "Vita!" he said, and they kissed, both cheeks. I retreated, not prepared to see her - kissing, and real. I hid in the crowd at the back of the bus.
During my fourth city summer I dreamed a restless winter dream. I had never left the farm. My father had ordered me out in the beginnings of a snowstorm to bring the cattle down from the northwest pasture to the barn. My horse's hooves struck the iron-cold earth in a skittish cantor, made irregular by the force of the wind. Dry pockets of snow began to accumulate in the frozen tufts of brown grass. The cattle grudgingly consented to be herded toward the meager shelter of the fodder. As we progressed, my dream shifted. The path before us straightened; beneath my horse's hooves, fitted stones appeared to pave the way. The snow and the cold melted into warmth and colour along the via Appia. Onward, toward the cattle markets of the Foro Boarium we drove, past mausoleums, catacombs and all nature of crumbling ruins.
* * *
In Rome I dreamed of the cattle again: I glimpsed them through the pillars of The Temple of Castor as they were led to the Campo Vaccino where they would be sold at market. I could smell them from where I sat on a ruined segment of a column on the floor of the Foro Romano. At first I felt that I was alone in the landscape of antiquity. The sun shone, warming me, warming even the indifferent stone. The cattle's hooves raised a din of dust; the humid heat of the day dissuaded the dust from spreading. Tails swatted flies away from pale hides, listlessly, in the middle distance. The brightness bore down on me. Soon the landscape began to fill in. Painters arrived and set up their easels. The scenery became hazy with brush stroke. The ruins shifted themselves for the sake of better composition. Aromas of linseed and turpentine wafted over the close smell of the cattle en plain airs. An awful-sounding cloud arose, and grew menacing in scope: as if one bumblebee, lacking in ambition, was suddenly drowned out by a swarm of willful wasps fleeing their gray paper nest.
I woke, convinced that I had been stung. The air was clammy after the heat of my dream. There was no sun in the waking Rome, only the gray paper dome of November. The cattle gone, only the sound remained; the wasps were everywhere. The Vespas flung themselves down the swarming artery of the via del Corso. They buzzed about the city's stone veins, vibrated in the narrowest viccolo like breath through the whetted reed of a clarinet. My windows shook with all they had to say.
In Rome myself at last, I realized how many of Professor Azar's slides were actually photographs taken by her. She had taught us her own perspective. Following in her footsteps, I stood where she had stood; I saw what she once saw. In every ruin I envisioned her lithe form floating before the images before my very eyes. The city refused to solidify. I lost myself in the darker, medieval quarters where the frail winter light would drown itself in the black shadows of her hair.
Fragments of photographs and portions of texts affixed themselves to my surroundings. No cattle clog the Forum. The Circus Maximus is really just a grassy field. The Mausoleum of Augustus endures an overgrown state similar to the ruins of the old farmhouse in the northwest pasture.
One bright spring day the Pantheon sprung out at me unexpectedly as I emerged from the dim arms of the via dei Pastini into the sunlit square. I ambled through the piazza playing my favorite game. Adjusting my position, northward, then westward, I kept my eyes firmly fixed on the portico, the pediment, the relative angle it made with the dome, aligning the monumental composition with the one I knew so well from Professor Azar's slide. And there she sat: her camera on the café table, her eyes on me, squinting, her brow furrowed - the warm sun in the Pantheon Square as dazzling - as blinding as the cold projector's glare.
"Sit," she said, and she smiled.
"I've been looking for you," I said.
* * *
She is Vita to me now - I call out her name when we lose each other on our rambles in the ruins.
"Vita!" through the gaping vacant arches of the Baths of Callicalla.
"Vita?" in dim subterranean corridors.
"Vita." I trace the counters of her skin - from collarbone to chin - Corinthian.
