Adventures in Rome

            Ricardo Güiraldes tells us in his Christian Trilogy that God was one day having a very great pleasure and finding everything to his liking, the people was celebrating the day crowded in his view and what was taking place deserved everyone’s approval. Things were like always they were. Many happy believers, joyful and in brethern. Like always some things were not taken as a big sin, what it would be if God took into account little sins, mercy on them, he is God for something. Angels whirled up in the sky and were guided by a wonderful spell.Then someone was brought to God’s throne, a doctor who said to God he did not believe in him and he lasted a split second to Angels. After that someone introduced himself and started complaining about things being just an illusion, denying the Father, a philosopher. Angels realized God’s doubts and they flew to the ground and caught the philosopher up and made him disappear in a gesture God would be grateful for. People that had seen what had happened to the philosopher cheered joyfully. But things could not go as easily as that, and a poet made his presence in front of God. I know…, the poet said to God, …the ideal of the flock, the common place of the ideal. Angels listened attentively waiting to have to work if necessary. And then the poet spoke again: I do not belong to your sheepfold… And he said something else, but Angels were alert and intervened anew and made the poet disappear. This time jubilee turned out a jumping for joy by everyone attending. After a while God made up his way to rest, grateful for what was happening and feeling better anyway.

            I am grateful indeed to Ricardo Güiraldes for having also made La Pampa known with La Pampa’s own language and with its own people. Fierce and helpless field! Gross field! More yet I should, he wrote my short story entitled Vision before I was born. Twice I have read Don Segundo Sombra in one go and many times I have reread some passages. First time in 1981 or 1982, while seated on the floor of the long corridor of La Mancha Neighbours Association, which is from 12 to 15 meters distance from my house. Second time was a year ago after a librarian at Usera’s Public Library left intentionally a Ricardo Güiraldes book on the shelves for books to take away freely so that I would take it away for me.

With this I get involved in a dream of events taking place in a very short time and with no sequences one after another that although alternate they have a common thread very easily understandable. The events took place in Madrid and Rome. The Brigate Rosse had assaulted and killed the whole prime minister Aldo Moro retinue of policemen and bodyguards with machine-guns in hand and had kidnapped the prime minister in the very Rome’s city center. In the newpapers I saw in first page a picture of the corpse of Aldo Moro inside a small van. He had been tortured, drugged and shot dead.

The following day it was Saturday and we three, that is, Pilar, Alberto and I, had to get up early in the morning to take our antique pieces to the Rastro in Madrid. In old times both Saturdays and Sundays were market days and people in the Rastro was a big flow of every kind of people. We were at our stall, the blanket on the ground plenty of antique pieces: noble wood small boxes, gold, silver, bronze and steel small sculptures and coins, porcelain and glass pieces, marble rulers. The case is we did not expect Patricia coming to see us and saying to us she should be going home like in an urgence, after she listened to me as she was coming nearer to us saying in an audible voice to everybody I was very Moro, that means also is Spanish argot  (Moor) possessive man with his woman. Pilar told me to use her mother’s car, a red Mini 1.275, to take Patricia home. I made a way of elluding other cars and people walking through the Rastro streets. It had been only a few days since I had met up my old comrade Alfonso Romero at Plaza del Dos de Mayo in Madrid.

I remember him from Xinzo de Limia and Ourense, we had been partners in a crime my mother and I carried out in the village. My father had told us both we were linked in relationship and crime and would be some day warrior leaders fighting for our brothers and sisters, Alfonso and I seated at a low wall beside Xinzo de Limia’s church. We had met up too during Sundays’ roller hockey matches at Jardín del Posío in Ourense, where his family and mine lived for one year, since we were five until we were six. When we were six both his family and mine came to live in Usera, in Madrid’s south. His home not far from mine in Poblado Dirigido de Almendrales. We had studied at the same college, Colegio Daoíz y Velarde in Usera, and we even remembered a teacher we had had in the village, doña René. One time standing by the Daoíz y Velarde School’s entrance door Vicente Mohedano, Alfonso and I, and being Vicente known by people with the nick of Loco (Mad), I told him Alfonso and I had killed a man in the village. Vicente seemed to me impressed and Alfonso said to me It was you. We left the School at the end of the scholar year and Alfonso had gone to study at Colegio Latino and I had gone to study at Colegio Nuestra Señora de Fátima with my brothers Luis and Arturo and Miguel, both colleges in Usera. After two years at the religious college I enrolled in Colegio Latino and Alfonso and I were classmates once more. He killed a man seated on a stall by the counter in Cobra disco. Antonio Cordero, Alfonso’s neighbour friend, Alfonso and I had been in Cobra disco only for a few minutes. I was standing instead of dancing at the dance floor because I did not feel like it and Alfonso had gestured me to go to him. I went to him and he took me to the toilet’s door. Wait here just an instant, he said, and came in in the toilet and came back very quickly, and then pointed out the forehead of the man seated on the stall by the counter and killed him. I had escaped very spectacularly. Alfonso came with Antonio Cordero to meet me up at Instituto Calderón de la Barca, where I had studied with my brothers Luis, Arturo and Miguel for one year after I changed of college. Alfonso came with Antonio Cordero to meet me up at Instituto Colegio España as well when I had changed of college once more. He had also come to meet me up at Colegio OSMA at Pizarro Street and as we were walking along Gran Vía he told me I had been filmed destroying with rocks the Banco Atlántico branch’s office it had not been by then one month ago. We laughed a bit at this: I told him my father was Banco Atlántico’s account’s holder. But when we met up at Plaza del Dos de Mayo was not the day Alfonso had announced to me, a day we revolutionaries shall be capable of doing prodigies since my encounter with my old comrades takes place.

So I had Alfonso Romero in mind and I was fully focused on the revolutionary actions we would be carrying out. Being things like this I asked Patricia at the semaphore at Plaza de Cibeles if her father was a fascist. I don't know, she said. Why do you ask?, she asked. ETA has killed a friend of Manuel and I do not know what is going to happen, I told her. I knew her father was a member of Fuerza Nueva, vomiting fascists henchmen, and I had to assure my position as revolutionary soldier imposing although it was blackmailing Patricia and her father and her family, including of course the captain general of the Army, her uncle Jaime Miláns del Bosch, who was in the military dome. I left her at her place and came back to the Rastro. Patricia had strange ways of reacting like that of saying it was like an urgency for her to go back home as soon as possible, after she listened to me saying I was very Moor, I suppose. I had a clear state of mind that enabled me to react quickly when necessary. 

I was in Rome, at Piazza Navona. I had gone there on foot from Excelsior Hotel, which is very near to Piazza de Spagna. At Piazza Navona there were nearly a hundred hippies and twenty or so painters and sketchers and many visitors, the Piazza was crowded. The atmosphere one may breathe standing there was not corrupted by the temptations of the big cities, and besides the Italian and international media was controlled by the Brigate Rosse and the international revolutionary forces. I spoke in Spanish to waiting hippies seated on a palace’s only echelon knowing they would understand. The main point was a massive revolutionary determination by talian people to start or follow the carrying out of Revolution. Nobody was innocent, Italy is not like paradise, it is full of poor people and poor people and workers must organize to take the power the sooner the better. I understood they were saying to me they did not want problems. I did not expect that but I accepted it as even normal and I went to watch the paintings and sketches. The murmurs at Piazza Navona grew up and I was not given an opportunity of saying anything about paintings or sketches. It seemed as if after having taken the power in Italy the working class would have their detractors. I should have said something about what happpened to me with painters and sketchers but it all seemed being as I am telling you, sometimes there is no way in trying to contribute with our minimum to Revolution. And things in Spain were not different. The international revolutionary forces were controlling the media. The murmurs became rumours very close to me. I knew then I had to make my escape some way.

I left the Piazza turning into a cobbled street while I heard voices of people or policemen or secret service agents coming behind me. I had just the time to do this: I looked at the cobbled passage and saw a red roofless Lamborghini driven by a very handsome Italian guy. I made him stop and went nearer to him saying: Handsome Italian, take me home that I am in a hurry. The italian guy was looking at me kind of I-can-not-do-anything story on his face. Can I trust in you and cross in front of the car or do I have to jump over you? Things were getting worse. I am communist and I have to go, come on, get off the car, I said imperiously to the Italian guy. And that was how I went back to Excelsior Hotel driving a red roofless Lamborghini that I parked just at the very hotel’s entrance door.

How it could not be so, as everybody knows, the Brigate Rosse killed Aldo Moro with a gun shot inside his mouth and I watched the film on which this revolutionary action takes place, once and over again, it may take endless conversations amongst some people in many of the world places only having seen it once. And this is not all, no way.

In Manuel’s house at 9 Jorge Juan Street we had the painting by Francisco de Zurbarán The House of Nazaret, on which the Virgin and the Child are together, she weaving a cloth, he trying to remove a small splinter from one of his fingers, both seated on chairs, a table with books, a window through which one can see the clouds in the sky and in the upper left angle of the painting one can see three Angels that look after Jesus all the time. On the main lounge wall, above the chimney, we had a painting extraordinarily executed of a philosopher dressed with patches and holding a book.

Well. What now? So what’s the problem if the Brigate Rosse have filmed italian prime minister Aldo Moro’s execution? I do admire hippy culture and I do like paintings, especially of course some paintings particularly, so being kind and grateful to yourselves you hippies and painters can be admired forever of Pablo Cabo’s and mine’s prodigies. Must I say once more Pablo Cabo and I killed 12 fascist attendants to Plaza de Oriente during dictator Franco’s speech on a July 18th when we were only ten? Pablo came with the newspaper next day. Look what they say: Only two people death and some injured. We have obliged them to hide the truth. He had also come to meet me up at the Instituto Calderón de la Barca, on that occasion to be with me while in the gym with others we did the trenches. And later in time he came to see me too when I had an examination at Instituto Lope de Vega.

Our hotel was near to Via Veneto, going by the left side from the hotel's entrance door. I had been twice at Via Veneto, but last was dangerous, for a car of pitiful aspect was being chased by a police car from where a policeman was shouting Stop! Stop! Stop!. The two presumably suspects stopped noisily and two policemen got off their car with guns in hand pointing at the two suspects. When this happened I was hiding behind a parked car, so seeing almost nobody had taken even notice of the chasing I dared not to come back to Via Veneto not to be recognized. Twice too I had gone on walking towads Piazza di Spagna (and had come down the stairs plenty of flowers and flowers sellers at both sides of the stairs). First time I went to the Spanish embassy to take pictures and second time I knew my friend Manuel would come down the same stairs. I had been waiting until I saw him coming down. When he had already made the stairs I shouted out loud: Manolo! Manolo! He made me out quickly and I took a picture of him from the distance, he looking straight at the camera. It was the third time I was coming out from the hotel to go on walking up to Piazza di Spagna. I was carrying no camera and went directly to Via Condotti, top wear fashion shops street in Rome. I wanted to have a coffee at El Greco, the elegance of cafés, thinking I may profit having a very good coffee in a country specialized in coffees. I entered El Greco and had a quick look at the elegant ambience, and I do not know why, there was a sudden silence and all the eyes were set on me. I sat down at one of the white marble tables. Some waiters and waitresses began to chuckle, to laugh openly when I said: Look at this! It seems a lie! And later I said in Spanish too with an absolute silence: What's the matter? It's impossible! You Italians have always been happy with Beauty, only Beauty is enough for you to make you happy, you praise Beauty. This graveness, this seriousness, this circunspection, this pomposity! I exclaimed after. The employees were having fun and all the clients in our room stayed rigid. A waitress asked me what I would like to order. I ordered a capuccino. For a moment there was still silence in the room and gay murmurs from the employees. When the waitress brought a capuccino to my table I asked her how much it was and she made a gesture with her hand like saying don't worry, you don't have to pay, but seeing my attempt to take out money from my jacket's pocket, she said to me laughing and spreading her laugh to the others: You are invited. You see, I said taking advantage of the still silence and laughs, so it seems at El Greco café only the Brigate Rosse, Fabio Testi and I are really welcome and besides our time here is well employed. 

To finish with, apart from the deeds I narrate about Rome and Naples in other short stories, I must indeed enhance the impression that caused to me the vision of Sant'Angelo Castle, which was of certainty that there shall be no unbelievers arguing against the Father, the Mother, the Child and the Angels, or against the Natural Law. Once having read it happened once to God, what more I need to know!