The road to Tivoli was as bleak and desolate as the centre of Rome had been beautiful. I was almost horrified by the sight of so much blatant poverty surrounding me in the basin-like peripheries of Rome, where I had commuted near the terminus of a metro line to catch an outbound regional bus to Tivoli. In the environs of Pampo Mammolo and onwards to Rebibbia, there was little to remind one of the incandescent beauties of the inner city. Instead of the narrow Renaissance and Medieval walkways crowded with blush pink and orange apartments fanned with turquoise shutters, there were instead mile after mile of poorly maintained government and social housing, unsightly apartment blocks, vast, homogenous and completely joyless except for the yellow colour they were painted. But it was not only these dejected-looking buildings that depressed me, but the locale in which they were embedded. It was an area completely devoid of signs of Roman life and high culture. Gone were the tobacconists with their possies of hip-swaying locals and men in flat caps, gone were the bars and terraces. There were not even shops or markets. Instead this land of apartment blocks was intersected by busy motorways, franchises, warehouses and multi-storey car parks. It was a no-where place, a place which seemed to have nothing in common with the capital of which it was obviously a part, and where I can only assume most of its population lives. I remembered the urging eyes of the receptionist at our second most luxury hotel Locando Colloseo. Si, take the bus from P., Mammalo. There you will at least see a little of real Rome.
So was this the ‘real’ Rome? Suddenly the wealth and beauty of the centre seemed repulsive to me, hypocritical and false. The contrast was too striking and depressing. If the peripheria was the reality then Rome proper was an unreality, an illusion and mirage, a place were tourism and other parasitic forms fo confabulation and enjoyment multiplied, but where real Romans did not live and which they could not afford to enjoy.
The more I thought about it, my face pressed up to the window of my local bus watching the endless procession of trade centres: Aldi, Lidl, Tile warehouses, Drive through Macdonalds, the more I realised that this paradox and the idea of Rome as ‘dream’ and ‘unreality’ could be historically situated. After all, Pasolini was one of the first post-war Italian film auteurs to explore the new identity of Rome, Rome after the apocalypse, after occupation and plunder and considerable new city planning courtesy of its brutal fascist occupiers, had changed it forever. Pasolini’s Rome was a Rome of the outskirts, of the peripheries, a fallen place, festering with crime and violence, but also, nevertheless, beautiful.
Try as I might to extract some redeeming features from the scenes unfolding about me, I could muster little enthusiasm for the project. But the darkness of my view and internal pessimism had also been shaped by the morning’s events, events that had left my heart cold, numb.
I do not wish to write about mine and Lukas’s relationship itself. It seems unfair to him, but obviously its course and evolution was very central to determining my experience of Rome, and more broadly speaking, my experience of life in Ghent.
After I returned to Ghent on that snowy late December afternoon in the final days of 2014, it occurred to me that many of my original justifications for staying in the city had disappeared. I was bored of my job, a job I could have anywhere, I had almost finished my book. I had ‘experienced’ living in Ghent from the best and worst vantage points, I had friendship, I had love. The only thing left to do was apply for PhDs. So I told myself: I would allow myself one final month in Ghent, January 2014. An agonising month passed, a month in which I had to use parts of my brain that hadn’t been exercised for years. To sound concise, to sound like a doctor. I had to wrench, literally wrench the language back into place, and for that process I hibernated in my room for almost three weeks.In that period there was little to lighten the tedium and mild excitement of putting together my PhD proposal, little except for Lukas, a few visits to Brussels and, of course, music. Even creativity and the excitement of feeling that part of me developing and growing stronger had waned – I had transplanted the creative part of my brain for the critical one. There are different activities, I realised and trafficking between them was not as easy as I thought. I even stopped my Dutch classes at the Congostraat, classes that I realised fulfilled little function as means to learning Dutch but which had given me a tangible forward momentum and progress, a momentum towards integration that I had then lost. My life had become winnowed down to a computer screen – pinned down to a future prospect that I could not count on. By the third week of January I had a momentous argument with Lukas in Brussels, following the mild success of our dernisage concert. Afterwards I felt empty, devoid of hope, filled with dread. I realised with a weary heart that my stay in Ghent wasn’t about writing anymore. It had become a love story.
So a love story it has been since then. But a difficult and strained one, one that has soared to summits and plunged to rocky depths, refusing to remain constant, identifiable or safe.
So it was that morning: a misunderstanding, a quickly sparked temper and then catastrophe. I was covered in water, water ejaculated from an angry water bottle. I was drenched in shame and humiliation, marked, muggy. He buzzed about me like an agry bee, I did my best to avoid him: ran to the ticket office and then upstairs to the bus platform hoping never to see him again. My lover turned aggressor, the one who now hated me. The day-trip was ruined. We were sundered. I was off to Tivoli – one of the most magnificent Renaissance gardens ever constructed – on my own. I was not angry or frightened, the bus was full of blithely-faced locals and he was not there. I was not proud – I should have been more self-controlled. Shame remained. Shame but something else too: resilience.
17.07.2015
I can write the rest of the story now, because there was an ending, and that beginning was written on the bus in my head on the way to Tivoli, and then quickly scratched out onto my keyboard when I got home.
So what happened?
I arrived at Tivoli at midday, at some point of what I could only guess was the centre of the town, but I still had no idea where the villa was. Slowly I retraced the route had taken through town remembering the iconic ‘I’ of a tourist information insignia some way back. In the light and heat of that day, with the terribly sad argument of a few hours ago trundling behind in my wake like a shadow, I felt suddenly absurdly alone. It was absurd to be here, doing this day trip on my own. But I plodded forward. I felt hungry, I bought a slice of pizza in a cheap Italian canteen. The lady flopped it down on a folded over envelope of baking paper and handed it over with a smile. Then I found a map. Location, power. I knew where it was. Just two streets away. I entered a quiet courtyard with a dry fountain at its centre. I walked forward to an unassuming door that marked the visitors entrance to the church and thus the villa itself.
Then I allowed the familiar ritual of visiting a museum or heritage site wash over me. The cold naked walls of the villa interior – rather spartanly decorated I thought – reminded me of a church. The quietness was soothing. I studied the faded wall frescoes, illustrations of the labour of Hercules. Water everywhere. Water, one of the villa information sheets dutifully informed me was the guiding decorative principle of both the house and the gardens. Water. My mind shot angrily back to the ‘scene’ in Rebibia Station where I had also been sprayed with water. The coincidence almost amused me, not to mention its libidinal overtones. As soon as I could I made my way outside: Tivoli was not made famous by the villa after all.
I was on the Vialone, a glorious emblazoning sun blinded me so that for a moment I could not see. Then I peered down beneath me and I remembered why I had come. I had come to visit one of the most famous Renaissance gardens in existence, one of the finest and most ambitious works of landscape architecture known to man. I glided down the travertine steps like a votary. The silence opened up by my solitude gave me space to dream, imagine and ask questions. Every fountain in the hazy sunlight seemed to beg questions. Why did Ligorio design like that? I asked myself. Well, there is so much humour and scatalogical referencing in this garden! I thought next. As the hours ticked by I knew that the garden would become my next story-project and that I would weave it into my book. It already so blatantly concerned two of the themes that interested me most: how nature can interact with art.
The Tiburtine Countryside
As I turned about and looked over the edge of the garden walls directly out across the Tiburtine countryside, I realised with a jolt of shock that I had been here before. Yes, I was suddenly sure of it, sitting up on a window-like aperture, looking out across the Tiburtine countryside I realised that my fifteen-year-old self had done exactly the same thing over ten years ago. Is that why I had felt so compelled to come to Tivoli? I wondered. Had a sensed, subliminally, a ghost urging me back, back to a place I was once happy? I almost shivered to think how thick with history this place was, a place I thought was foreign to me. I thought of how my childish delight in the place contrasted to the mood of sombre maturity that now stalked me, that now silenced me. On that beautiful day the truth was I felt so sad, so sad about what had happened that I could only find comfort in academic-type thinking. If I thought or felt with the heart of a human being I would have wilted. Several hours passed by, I waited specially to hear the performance of the hydraulic organ at five o’ clock and then, feeling a coolness set in, decided to walk back to the railway station so that I could find Lukas again in Rome before dinner time. I could not imagine that he would be happy to see me, perhaps he had even left the hotel. Rigidity had crept into my body, yet I could not ignore the beauty of the medieval part of the city as I wandered through it and so allowed myself to get lost. It was the final gift of the day. Up and down I climbed delighting in the vertiginous dark town houses crowding the sky above me and the small piazzas of decidedly rural character. By the time I found the train station, perching strangely far from the town centre on the edge of an adjoining mountain it was clearly sunset. I quickly bought a regional ticket in a small booth and walked onto the platform warmed by the late evening sun. I walked to the lefthand side of the platform seeking out the warmth. Then suddenly I saw him. I cannot say why exactly, but I still feel now writing this, as I did at that moment, that the sight of Lukas sitting there, reading a book on a bench, not seeing me in Tivoli railway station, was one of the most profoundly beautiful things that I had ever seen. Through the fine web of his hair, the sun shone bright orange, his stooped back and slouching hippie pants made his silhouette look oddly at ease. Relief, gratitude, love, joy surged through my body with too much power and urgency to control them. Any bitter feelings, any stoicism, any sadness immediately evaporated in the undeniable presence of so much love. What followed was as natural and uncalculating as the wind: I walked quickly up to him and kissed him deeply on the lips. It was over, he had come back to me. Hand in hand we retraced our steps back through town and I told him everything I had learnt of the gardens. We didn’t get back home till very late that night and in a way, I felt I never wanted to leave Tivoli, the scene of our reconciliation, again.
833 words a day 