(Originally published on wrath-bearingtree.com as part of a series with Mike Carson and Adrian Bonenberger.)
Barabbas walked hurriedly down a dusty side alley in the old city of Jerusalem, glancing side to side before furtively ducking into a low doorway of a house where he was finally able to drop his uncomfortable human disguise and assume his true form. His size and shape remained roughly the same, but his skin changed to something akin to scales of a metallic green hue, and his face flattened and slightly elongated with completely black eyes and mere slits for nasal and auditory apertures. His mouth became a toothless oval, fishlike. For though he clearly was not a creature born of this earth, his own planet was mostly marine, and the intelligence that developed there were originally aquatic. Human biologists would lately describe the phenomenon as convergent evolution, and it applied equally to interplanetary organic life. He had actually come to Earth from a planet orbiting the star that would eventually be named Theta Herculaneum. He had not come alone, however, but as the leader of 17 emissaries that were to meet their foe on neutral ground for negotiations to a possible peace treaty of a war that had lasted nearly 100,000 years.
Across the empty room from Barabbas sat a curious structure: two dark metallic cubes sitting one on top of the other, with a third much smaller cube placed on top. This smaller top cube slowly turned a quarter of a rotation and back again, as sound emanated from it.
“Barabbas, I assume,” came the voice from the cube. “You are ten minutes late from the time agreed upon.”
“I was stopped by two of the humans. Soldiers of the Roman faction, apparently. They tried to detain me and were holding their iron blades as if to strike.”
“And what did you do?” Asked the cube.
“I killed them, of course. It takes so little for these fragile creatures. I merely used a charged neutrino stream and they never knew what hit them.”
“That may have been unwise,” replied the cube.
“What do I care? I disagreed with the council’s decision to come to this planet, and I don’t understand what we should have to do with these mammalians. It’s revolting seeing their absurdly primitive society dragging itself around in the dust, using organic labor to pile up rocks to live in. They haven’t even figured out the periodic table on their own yet!”
“Perhaps you should judge not lest you also be judged. Where do you think your species came from? Or mine, for that matter. We, too, started out as organic, carbon-based matter. We infiltrators, too, had to take the long, hard road to hyper-enlightenment and transmorphosis. From what I have intuited from the archives, my own original world was not dissimilar to this one. That world which perished in a supernova 500 million years ago. Yes, these humans are a primitive, barely stage one intelligence. But your own species, Barabbas, is not much older from my perspective, and still merely at stage three. Still dependent on solid organic matter, still stuck in slower than light speed travel.”
“Fine, you made your point. Let’s get on with things, shall we? We both came a long way for this meeting, after all. By the way, what shall I call you?”
“The name I have been using here is a common one in the local dialect: Jesus.”
“Do you have a real name?”
“Not one that can be conveyed aurally.”
“I heard some talk from the local humans about someone named Jesus that has been putting on displays of breaking the laws of physics as they understand it. Something called miracles, apparently. What exactly have you been up to?”
“Nothing you need worry about. Our terms for peace are simple. We will agree not to destroy your species and to let you maintain your influence over all systems within 50 lightyears of the Theta quadrant. All we require is that you leave the Sol system and all its planets, including this one, and never return.”
Barabbas, normally an acute thinker and decision maker, took a moment to process the shocking offer he had just heard. It made no logical sense to his evolved ichthyic brain, nor could he compute what permutation of game theory the infiltrators were pursuing.
“What is so special about this world? And what makes you think we’re interested in it anyway? We have plenty of our own, with much more promising species under development,” replied Barabbas.
Jesus maintained his same equanimous tone, his machine intelligence never betraying a hint of anything resembling emotion or sentiment, “Our terms are clear. If you agree, we will cease the dismantling of your star systems effective immediately. You must closely follow my instructions before leaving this world never to return. The rest we will be under our purview.”
Barabbas felt unable to raise any objections, though he still did not totally trust the machine, or understand what factors had changed recently to cause such an unexpected outcome. Yet he hesitated momentarily once more, warily and wistfully, before replying, “Agreed.”
The next twenty-four hours Barabbas spent on the planet before leaving were unusual, but remained forever mysterious to the aquatic Thetan. He sent a message via a quark stream to his diplomatic counterparts located around the globe telling them to exfiltrate immediately. He was then led outside the house by Jesus, into the busy streets of the primitive human city of Jerusalem. Both had obviously shifted their outer appearance back to that of local humans of the Judean tribe. Ironically, they shared a close resemblance at this point despite their almost infinite divergence of mind. They both had short, dark wiry hair with thick black beards, dark olive wood complexion, and wore loose linen robes with leather sandals. If not twins, they might have almost been mistaken for genetic siblings.
Jesus led Barabbas to another nearby house where he ingested some bits of plant and animal food with a small group of human followers. After leaving, Barabbas was suddenly beset by a larger group of Roman soldiers and arrested. He resisted the urge to neutralise them all instantly due to Jesus’ strict instructions to cause no harm to any human. He was subsequently released by an apparent local leader of the humans less than six hours later. As he ambulated towards the exit of the palace courtyard, he saw Jesus under guard by the same group of soldiers. Jesus glanced at his former adversary briefly before silently continuing his entrance to the prison. Barabbas left and walked out of the city, preparing for his departure according to the terms of the treaty.
He could not overcome his innate curiosity, however, and he delayed his escape to learn more about the Infiltrator’s plan. He waited on a small shrubby hill south of the city throughout the night. In the morning, he witnessed a slow procession approach in his direction centered around Jesus. He appeared dirty and covered in liquid blood of the human type. On one part of the hill a piece of dead wood was raised vertically to which Jesus was attached with ropes. At a certain point he lifted his head to the sky and said something in the local dialect, which Barabbas interpreted as “My progenitor, how have you forgotten me?” His head drooped down, seemingly lifeless. Almost imperceptibly, however, his eyes looked directly at Barabbas in the distance, as if signalling he knew the terms of the agreement were being broken by his lingering presence.
Barabbas felt fear for the first time in centuries, and immediately vanished from the city. He soon reappeared in his vessel orbiting the planet, where he briefed his companions on the demands of the Infiltrators, and the decision he had made on all their behalf. “If he leaves our sector of the galaxy alone, let Jesus have his plans for his human planet,” he thought to himself as they accelerated toward their 50-year journey home.
Harold Bloom writes of the anxiety of influence that has afflicted writers going back, in the Western tradition, to Homer. We could stretch the metaphor to include not just writers, or artists, but all classes of people. For military leaders, for example, one recalls Plutarch’s anecdote of a middle-aged Julius Caesar weeping when confronted by a statue of Alexander the Great in the province of Spain. “He had conquered the world by the age of 27. I am 32 and have done nothing!” he said. Alexander himself, during his destruction of the rebellious city of Thebes before launching the invasion of Persia, ordered that only the house of the poet Pindar to be spared the flames. After crossing the Hellespont into Asia he then paid homage to the grave mound of Achilles (his ancestor!) at Troy. Lucian of Samosata in the 2nd century A.D. writes of Greco-Roman tourists visiting the birthplaces of philosophers like Zeno and Epicurus. He also mentions streams of pilgrims to the site in Cappadocia where the thaumaturge Apollonius of Tyana ascended bodily to heaven. Likewise, Suetonius notes that Virgil’s Mantua home or just north to Catullus’ Lake Garda palace were itineraries growing in popularity with well-to-do Romans. Petrarch’s frescoed house in the Euganean Hills near Padua has been visited by poetic disciples since the early Renaissance (I took my students on a school trip two years ago). All this is to say that pilgrimage is not for religious journeys alone, but for any act of traveling that takes us to a place of special cultural significance.
I myself have walked the ancient trail of the Camino de Santiago, visited the holy sites of Jerusalem, and been half a dozen times to Rome, all charged with numinous spiritual energy. Moreover, I have looked upon battlefields dating from the sack of Troy itself, to the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, the Punic wars, to the more modern Napoleonic wars, American Revolution, American Civil War, Italian wars of Independence, and dozens of sites from both World Wars (to say nothing of the two years I myself spent in Afghanistan). Rambling around a Gettysburg, or Waterloo, or the Normandy beaches (not to mention an ancient Thermopylae or Lake Trasimeno) evokes sentiment of strong collective memory and tragic action, but such sites nevertheless remain anonymously hallowed grounds that center around no single individual. Napoleon himself comes closest to a lone evocative “hero” who overpowers the masses of nameless men buried wherever he went, and whose legacy is ubiquitous across Europe and beyond. Seemingly everywhere I go, from Spain, to Egypt and Israel, to Russia, to the Northern Italian plain where I live, Napoleon has walked the ground and left traces to be followed and remembered. I once slept fitfully on the floor of a dilapidated villa over Lake Como which housed a billiard table once played on by the Corsican. Religious pilgrimage, battle and bloodshed, Caesar and Napoleon, these things hold our imagination and compel us to pay respect, even when given begrudgingly. For it can become a respect that is too big, too weighty, almost inhuman. The things that touch us more are the remnants and relics we glimpse of our forebears who were fallible, down-to-earth humans, not deities. Artists, whether writers, painters, musicians, whether giants or geniuses, and of certain kinds and to varying degrees, are all-too-human, and thus allow us to walk in their footsteps, to see ourselves more clearly through them, to be inspired and influenced, even enriched and blessed, by them.
Shakespeare, setting aside Homer, is Bloom’s quintessential artist who was himself uniquely free from the anxiety of influence, while simultaneously creating it in every subsequent writer. Such was not necessarily the case for his earthly estate—his famous Tudor-style birth house in Stratford-Upon-Avon only became a protected property and tourist destination in the mid-19th century due to the efforts of Charles Dickens. It was in fact during this Victorian period when modern tourism at cultural destinations became increasingly popular for the upper classes, and which accelerated again after the end of the First World War for the middle classes. Today, Shakespeare’s house could be considered a model of the overpriced commodification of culture that lacks artistic authenticity. Authenticity is the crucial word here, because it is this that this gives power to the places we seek out, or discover by accident, on our various pilgrimages. I would exchange a simple artifact, or monument, or plaque freely situated in loco for any expensive entrance fee crowded amongst tourists who are often more in search of a momentary escape from boredom than an authentic intellectual experience and its accompanying reverence.
Palazzo Vendramin Calergi – Wagner Plaque
In Venice, for example, there were times during a single day-trip when I wandered without purpose down narrow lanes, away from the sardine-packed tourist routes, haunted by the past, in search of nothing in particular, but open to whatever may come. I glanced up at various times to notice humble marble plaques adorning old buildings: an old palazzo in Cannaregio where Jean-Jacques Rousseau spent a frustrated year as French ambassador; a statue of Carlo Goldoni outside the palace where he was born; another noble palace (which later became the official Casinò of Venice) where Richard Wagner had died. This last contains a poetic inscription written by Gabriele d’Annunzio, who consciously designed his own living tomb and memorial at a sprawling villa over Lake Garda, which serves as both a site for school trips and an ongoing site d’hommage for fascist Mitläufer. In Florence, I once glanced up to find a plaque on the house that Dostoevsky wrote The Idiot while in self-imposed exile after his release from a Siberian prison colony. In Milan, likewise, I espied a plaque outside the old Red Cross hospital near the Ambrosiana where Hemingway recovered from his shrapnel wound, inspiring A Farewell to Arms.
Hemingway deserves his own paragraph, for it is he as much as any other modern writer who has left a solid geographical legacy whence tourists can easily follow. Italy, Spain, France, Cuba, not to mention Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, or Idaho—there are a plethora of houses, bars, and various monuments and specious museums once haunted by Hemingway. His statue is outside the bullring in Pamplona, where one arrives after running with the bulls; Harry’s Bar in Venice charges outrageous prices (and enforces a strict dress code, which is why I was denied entrance) just for visitors to say they drank at the bar where Hemingway sipped copious Bellinis; in Paris there is more than one bar that tries to do the same to cash in on his ‘Lost Generation’ years there; even the town where I work, Bassano del Grappa, has a dedicated Hemingway Museum in the old villa along the Brenta River where his Red Cross ambulance unit was based at the end of the war. His larger-than-life persona (even if this was as much about marketing as reality), and international adventures (big-game safaris, deep-water fishing, multiple wars corresponding, multiple wives left in his wake…) make him a household name and an easily accessible target for mass tourism.
The writer who most warmed to the idea of literary pilgrimage for its own sake is Max Sebald. His novels often consist in his retracing the footsteps of various literary forebears, and investigating the palimpsest of intellectual and architectural history that abounds below the surface of our cities and our lives. In his novel Vertigo, especially, he makes a trip from Venice to Verona, around Lake Garda, and back to Germany. Along the way he writes about the connection to each place of writers like Stendhal, Casanova, and Kafka. In the final section, he reluctantly returns to his tiny hometown of Wertach, where he shares nothing in common with the ignorant villagers. Despite that, playing on the growing fame of Sebald, someone today has newly created a “Sebald path” through the nearby countryside. One of my friends who appreciates Sebald even more than I has made this pilgrimage and confirmed its strange existence.
In both Trieste and Dublin, visitors can follow in the footsteps of James Joyce’s life and works, though I’d wager that very few who do so have ever read anything by Joyce. In fact, there is a statue of Joyce along the Grand Canal in Trieste, near the old Berlitz school where Joyce taught English for 15 years, including to the writer Italo Svevo (who has his own statue). In Duino, near Trieste, there is a romantic castle that once hosted the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and inspired his Duino Elegies. There is a beautiful walking path along the cliffs named after him because of his own typical walks overlooking the Gulf of Trieste. On a hill above Bolzano I once found a path where Freud used to take daily walks during his summer visits, when it was still part of the Austrian empire. In Greece, I stayed in a village with a small beach-side cottage that Nikos Kazantzakis lived in for two years (1917-18) with the real-life Georgios Zorbas. The pair tried to establish a nearby coal mine, which became the basis for the later character of Alexis Zorba of the famous novel (and film). Just outside Geneva, one can visit a chateau built by Voltaire in a town now named after the genius philosopher (genius especially for his unique ability amongst philosophers to make himself rich in order to guarantee his own financial, and thus political, freedom).
If we enter Geneva, in the cemetery precisely, we can find the final magically realist resting place of the Argentinian (but Old World in spirit) Jorge Luis Borges. Indeed, it is in cemeteries in general where we often find and reflect on great lives lived. One of their upsides is that they are free of charge, and generally free of tourists (two things I value more than over-priced and over-crowded), not to mention authentic. What could be more authentic than the final physical remains of a once living spirit who lived, created an artistic legacy, and died. Thus does the Pantheon in Rome become more powerful by containing the incongruous tomb of Raphael (for it is only he and the first two kings of Italy who are interred in the Augustan edifice). The most famous cemetery of all is no doubt Père Lachaise in Paris, where one can find the resting place of scores of famous artists of all stripes, from Balzac to Oscar Wilde. Here you can find surely the most touristed tombs in the world, those of Chopin and Jim Morrison, and yet the lingering presence of the monstrous dictator Trujillo desecrates all around him. In Venice, the island cemetery of San Michele is a place for respectful rumination that is not as populous, but just as evocative as its Parisian cousin. Then to Nafplio, in the Peloponnese, we find the final resting place of that most infamous Doge of Venice, Francesco Morosini, who was responsible for the reconquest of Greece from the Ottomans, at the expense of the destruction of the Acropolis on his orders. Back to Kazantzakis, his own tomb is situated on the Venetian ramparts outside Heraklion, Crete, because his excommunication by the Church meant that he could not be buried in a cemetery. The epitaph reads “Δεν ελπίζω τίποτα. Δε φοβάμαι τίποτα. Είμαι ελεύθερος (‘I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free’).”
In Vicenza, where I lived for many years, there is a plaque on a building on the main piazza commemorating one single night that Giuseppe Garibaldi slept there. It was in 1867 after Venice was finally captured from Austria in the Third War of Italian Independence, and when Garibaldi was very likely the most famous and admired person in Europe. The plaque merely reads “Garibaldi, who cried ‘Rome or Death’, stayed here.” Likewise in Torbole, a windy town washed by the northern tip of Lake Garda, there is a low arch equipped with a fountain and a plaque recounting one single night that Johann Wolfgang Goethe slept there in 1786, on the trip that inspired his memorable Italian Journey. A few blocks away in this same small town there is a memorial to Colonel William O. Darby, a US Army Ranger commander who was killed by German artillery on this spot on April 30, 1945. This was the same day Hitler killed himself, and almost the last day of the war in Europe. This same commander gave his name to the infamous obstacle course, the ‘Darby Queen’, that all candidates at Ranger School in Fort Benning will forever remember.
Nearby Vicenza, and Bassano del Grappa, is the picturesque hill town of Asolo, which was where the British adventurer and travel writer Freya Stark made her home until dying there at the age of 100. Stark was one of the first westerners, and certainly the first woman, to travel alone across the Arabian Desert, and recounted some of her earlier adventures in excellent The Valley of the Assassins. Murals about her life can be seen in the town, and one can also visit her tomb, which happens to be next to the tomb of Eleonora Duse, Gabriele d’Annunzio’s muse and lover, and the greatest actress of her day. Further down the Italian peninsula to the Tuscan hills near Siena, we can find the scenic country estate of Gregor von Rezzori, a German-Romanian post-war writer of the memoirs The Snows of Yesteryear. This estate still hosts a retreat for writers including the likes of Bruce Chatwin and Michael Ondaatje. In nearby Orsigna, an Apennine village near the ancient tree-lined border of Tuscany and Emilia, we can visit the home of Italian journalist and travel writer Tiziano Terzani, whose Letters Against the War greatly influenced my thinking during my own participation in the War on Terror. A film was made there based on his last book, The End is My Beginning. Further down the peninsula in Ravello, overlooking the beautiful Amalfi coast, we can visit the Villa Rondinaia, where the great American writer Gore Vidal lived and worked for decades. And yet another nearby villa on the island of Capri is tucked away near the many villas of the emperor Tiberius, a modernist design that was the residence of the WWII-era Italian writer Curzio Malaparte. This setting is so unique and memorable that Jean-Luc Godard chose it for his film Le Mépris (Contempt).
On Corfu, one can dine at an expensive restaurant called the White House that used to be the residence of Lawrence Durrell, where he wrote his many travel books, and part of his underrated masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet. It was also here that his good friend Henry Miller spent one year, which inspired The Colossus of Maroussi, his favorite (and mine) among his own novels. Further down on Corfu, there is a palace called the Achilleion which was built for the Austrian Empress Sissi, and was later purchased by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who spent much of his post-war exile there, engaging in his passion for hunting (apparently he had not caused enough death already in the first war) and archaeology. The Empress Sissi also left her mark in Merano, where an incredible castle with beautiful gardens markets itself to visitors today as ‘Sissi’s Castle’, even though she only stayed there for one month.
Back to Napoleon, on Elba Island there is a small palace where the former Emperor “ruled” the island during the nine-months of his first exile, and designed the golden-bee flag of Elba (which was itself a version of the old Medici flag of Tuscany). Back to Garibaldi, there is a small island north of Sardinia that was privately owned by the great general himself, and where he spent his self-imposed retirement and exile after single-handedly conquering the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and gifting it to the new King of Italy, sine ulle conditione. Back to Venice, one finds a palazzo looking out over the lagoon’s northern expanse where Nietzsche resided for seven of his most productive literary years. Then to Turin, we can look around the Piazza Carignano where Nietzsche witnessed a violent horse flogging and desperately went to embrace the horse, his final lucid moment before the final 11 years of syphilis-induced madness and death. If we continue down the Italian coast to La Spezia, we find the beautiful and aptly-named Gulf of Poets, which was famously visited by Byron and the Shelleys. D.H. Lawrence, who loved Italy (Sardinia in particular), as well as Henry James, also visited this Gulf. Back to Venice (for all literary roads lead not to Rome, but to Venice), one can visit the chamber in the Palazzo Barbaro where Henry James lodged and wrote several works, including The Aspern Papers. Moving to Rome, we find another room near the Aventine hill that hosted James while writing Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady. Back to Greece, we can visit a memorial to Lord Byron, whose poetic heart remains interred at Missolonghi where he died of fever while fighting in the Greek War of Independence. Further south in the Mani peninsula of the Peloponnese, we find the charming sea-side villa of the British travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, who fought in the Greek resistance against the Nazi occupation in Crete.
Back to my home of Vicenza once more, there is a little-known plaque on a certain palace near Corso Palladio that reveals it to be the birthplace of Luigi da Porto, the little-known original author of the old story of Romeo and Juliet that inspired Shakespeare. And so we end where we began—with the divine Bard. Guided by him, we can let our anxieties rest and our inspirations lead us where they will, rambling amongst cultural artifacts and collective memory, part of a rich history and an infinite world where giants have always walked.
The tourist guide looked up at the carved stone symbols I indicated and said, “I think so, yes.”
“Why is it there?”
“I’m not sure actually,” she said, before adding, “Perhaps it was part of the coats-of-arms of a rich patron.”
The answer was unsatisfying, and we continued the tour into the ship-like interior of the Basilica Palladiana. Walking up wide flat steps to the upper terrace revealed a view of Vicenza that gave a bird’s eye view of the grid of narrow streets I had been gradually learning the past two months. Dark clouds were building over the mountains to the north, like Giorgione’s Tempest. I bought a glass of red at the rooftop bar and stayed to enjoy the view. The tour was over.
In the piazza below the people were scurrying to and fro. I sent a text to my friend and fellow Army officer, Rachel, asking her to come up a join me. She said she was on her way. I pulled out my book but had to read each sentence three or more times. I was too distracted by people-watching to absorb the prose. There is always something seedy or secretly shameful about being alone at bar or restaurant with no apparent diversion. At least that’s how it feels to me; the families and couples at the other tables probably didn’t care if there was a young man sitting alone at the neighboring table. The book, like a newspaper-reading pensioner on a park bench, gave me an alibi. The wine and late afternoon sun relaxed me to the point that I entered a trance-like state for a few moments.
I looked up and saw Rachel approaching my table with her big, white, American teeth smiling. My heart beat faster.
“Hi, Drew. What a great place!” she said, turning her head to take in more of the panorama. “I’ve never been up here.”
“It’s my first time, too,” I said nonchalantly. “Did you just finish work?”
“Yeah, I had to sit through an interminable staff meeting.”
“Sounds like more fun than mine. I had to do a sensitive-items inventory all afternoon with the supply sergeant.”
Did any of the items get their feelings hurt?” she said with a little giggle.
“Ha ha.”
What are you hiding down there?” I lifted up the book’s cover to show her.
Oh, I loved that book!” she exclaimed.
“It’s alright I guess. I checked it out of the library because I liked the cover. It seems a bit childish so far.” I was keeping my cards close to my chest, as they say.
“It’s really good. Wait till you get to the ending. It’s so powerful that it actually helped me make up my mind to join the army.”
“Was it in English?”
“Obviously. I’m starting to learn a few words of Italian slowly. Ciao. Grazie. Vino Rosso. Anyway, apparently this Palladio guy was a really big deal. His buildings are all over town, and in Venice, too.”
“I know, I’ve heard a lot about him since I’ve been here. I love art but I’m not really into architecture too much.”
“Same here, but I am into history and cultural stuff. Did you know that Thomas Jefferson designed Monticello based on Palladio’s Villa Rotonda, which is just outside town?”
“That’s cool.”
“I’m going to go take a look at it later if you want to come,” I mentioned casually. “Sure. Might as well see the sights.”
“Maybe this weekend then?” I inquired.
“Sure!”
I was feeling confident now, especially after having already finished half the carafe of a robust local wine.
“Look at those stone carvings up there.” I pointed at the friezes encircling the top of the building.
“What is it? A cow skull?”
“I think it’s an ox.”
“Really? How did you get to be an expert in bovine skeletal patterns?”
“I asked the tourist guide about it but she didn’t have any idea.”
“Not surprised.”
“What do you think it means?”
“I don’t know. It could be a secret symbol for something.”
“Obviously. There’s no point in just surrounding the top of a great Renaissance building with ox skulls.”
“Now that I think about it, I remember something from my art history class in college. There was an Italian artist whose name had something to do with oxen. Cimabue, I think it was.”
“Never heard of him.”
“He was the teacher of another artist, Giotto. His name meant ox-head, if I recall.”
“Giotto I have heard of. In fact, I think he did some famous paintings not too far away, in Padova. We should go see those, too,” I proposed.
“Ok, I’m going to try to see as much as possible in this country. And there sure is plenty to see around here.”
“Thanks for the tip on Cimabue, by the way. I’ll look into it.”
“So you’re really into this ox mystery.”
“I don’t know why, but it’s just striking. It gives me something to explore. It’s like a treasure hunt.”
“Hey, I know: maybe it’ll end up like a Dan Brown book where the ox was the symbol of some secret society that tried to assassinate the king,” she said giggling again. I couldn’t help but smile and break my cool facade to play along with the joke.
“The doge of Venice, possibly. Or the Pope. There was no king of Italy back then. Maybe Marco Polo was a member of the society and he brought back mystical knowledge of the cult of the ox from China. That book sounds even better than this one.”
“Don’t joke like that,” she teased.
“You want to go and find a pizza place? There’s a really good one just down the street” I queried hopefully.
“Let’s do it!”
The streets around the center of town were almost empty at this hour, except groups of army soldiers running in formation. My platoon was doing squad-level training around the inside of the base, so I took the opportunity to do a long run outside with the company executive officer, First Lieutenant Mark Brodie.
As we left the asphalt and entered the cobblestone section of the old city center, I saw occasional signs of life in the form of street cleaners wearing high-visibility vests, a businessman in a three-piece suit holding a briefcase, and a delivery man on a bike pulling a cart full of packages.
“Let’s do a detour here towards the main square,” I said through my heavy breathing. We finished the last slight incline that opened onto the biggest open space in the city, surrounded by palaces, high-end shops, colonnades, loggias, and the Basilica Palladiana. We came to a stop next to a pair of columns in the middle of the square.
“How about a pushup contest?” asked Mark suddenly. I agreed and we dropped to our hands and knees on the dewy flagstones of the piazza.
“You ready?”
“Yeah.”
“Go.” We started pushing ourselves up and down in unison while counting out the numbers. At forty I was really starting to slow down while my colleague was still going strong.
“Forty-five…forty-six,” he said, while at this point I dropped to the ground and ceded him the victory. He did four more to make an even fifty. We were both gasping for air for a couple minutes as we shook out our arms and legs.
“Nice work, man. I’m out of shape, I guess.”
“No worries. You want to get back to the run now?”
“Let’s take another minute to stretch out here. It’s nice having this whole square to ourselves. I came through here a few mornings ago after P.T. and it was absolutely packed full with the weekly market.”
“Sounds like fun. Did you buy anything?”
“No way. It’s all a bunch of Chinese crap. Anyway, look up there,” I pointed up to the stone carvings. “What does that look like to you?”
“Stone carvings.”
“Of what?”
“Some kind of animal skull. Maybe a bull, or an ox.”
“I think it’s an ox.”
“What’s the difference between a bull and an ox, anyway?”
“I believe oxen are just castrated bulls. Probably made them easier to control when they had to do all the hard field work.”
“Sucks to be them.”
“And it also makes you wonder about the phrase, ‘strong as an ox.’ I doubt any well-built men would find it a compliment if they knew that oxen had no balls.”
“Let’s start saying ‘strong as a bull’ instead. I just won the push-up contest because I’m strong as a bull. You, on the other hand, are strong as an ox.” “Thanks.”
“Alright, let’s keep going.” We started again at a moderate pace.
“I just thought of something,” said Brodie after a minute. “I’ve been reading up on Afghan history to get ready for the next deployment. They’ve got this fierce, independent streak that goes back to the time of Alexander the Great; it seems that they’ve never been conquered. Greeks, British, Russians, nobody could fight the mountain tribes in their own territory. I wonder if that’s what’s going to happen to us Americans next?”
“Who knows? Anyway, let’s not forget the Mongols. They conquered the hell out of Afghanistan and everyone else they encountered. They just slaughtered everybody and moved on.”
“Maybe that’s what we’ll have to do, too.”
“More like building schools and hospitals. We are trying to ‘nation-build,’ not burn everything down, Genghis-style.”
“The thing I wanted to mention was that Alexander the Great’s famous horse was called Bucephalus. Do you know what the name means?”
“No, but it sounds like a good name for a rapper.”
“It means ox-head.”
“Wow, that’s strange. Last night I showed Rachel the same stone carvings and she mentioned an Italian artist named ox-head.”
“So you’re seeing a lot of Rachel lately? Anything going on with you two?” he joked, half-seriously.
“Let’s race up to the top of this hill. If you win, I’ll tell you. If I win, you’re an ox-head.”
Later that evening I stopped by my apartment to change clothes and go out for another pizza. I met my landlord, Giulio, in the stairwell.
“Ciao, Giulio.”
“Ciao, Andrea!”
“Just call me Drew.”
“Everything is working in your flat?”
“Yeah, everything’s great. I’m almost never at home though.”
“Yes, I notice. You leave early in the morning and you come back late at night. Sometimes I see no lights in your flat for many weeks.”
“We do a lot of training events at other bases. Sometimes in Germany.”
“You take a drink upstairs with me?”
“Sure, thanks.”
“You help me practice my English.”
“I need to learn some more Italian, too.”
“Yes, you do! You drink red wine?”
“I love red wine. It’s so good and cheap here.”
“This is homemade, by my uncle in the country.”
“It’s delicious. Fruity, almost spicy.”
“It is called a new wine. The grapes were picked only last month.”
“Giulio, you must know a lot about Vicenza.”
“I am born here.”
“Have you ever noticed those stone carvings at the top of the Basilica?”
“Hmm. Yes, I think so.”
“What do you think they mean?”
“I am not so sure. Probably they are symbols for something.”
“That’s what I thought. The tour guide said maybe they were symbols of a rich patron.”
“I think not. Those would be different, more personal to each family. On the loggia going up to Monte Berico you will find many of those, for example.”
“We run up there at least one morning a week, but I never looked so closely. I’ll check it out tomorrow.”
“These animals were very important for ancient peoples, you must understand. It could represent something mythological.”
“Probably, like how Zeus turned into a bull to rape some mortal woman.”
“Yes, these metamorphoses were famous stories in Italy also. They inspired many great painters, like our Tiziano or Tintoretto. You have seen them in the Accademia in Venice?”
“I haven’t been yet. But I was just telling my friend yesterday that we should go see Giotto in Padova.”
“Oh, yes, of course. It’s very nice. You will like.”
“Do you know a lot about art, then? It seems like Italians are way more into art than Americans, or maybe any other country.”
“No, I studied letteratura. Literature. But we study many years of art in school.”
“Well, this was the center of the Renaissance.”
“Italy has a unique history. It has only been a united country since 1860, you know? Before that it was many different kingdoms and independent cities. There was much competition to make the best art.”
“I guess so.”
“And there was a different language and culture in each region. In fact, most people here today still speak Venetian dialect. Maybe you should learn this instead of proper Italian!”
“I don’t know about that. Maybe if I stay here for 10 years and become fluent in Italian, then I’ll start working on the dialects.”
“Yes, you should. That reminds me of a famous indovinello—that is, a type of mysterious word game.”
“A riddle.”
“Yes, so this riddle was the first written record of modern Italian language. That is, not Latin but the vernacular tongue. It comes from Verona and is about oxes working in the fields.”
“Plural is oxen, not oxes.”
“Ah, yes, of course. Oxen, like children.”
“Or women,” I joked.
“Anyway, the riddle was written by a monk who was describing the process of writing like plowing fields with oxen. There was even a type of ancient writing called boustrophedon, which means something like turning the ox. Instead of lines of text always left to right, the scribes would finish one line left to right and then start the next one on the right and move back left.”
“Wow, that’s interesting. And weird how oxen keep coming up. My friend this morning just told me that Alexander the Great’s horse was called ox-head, and there was an Italian artist also named ox-head. The teacher of Giotto, I think.”
“Yes, Cimabue.”
“Oxen were all the rage back then.”
“All the rage?”
“It means they were popular.”
“Certainly. Without them the people would probably die.”
“You’re probably right,” I said and gulped down the last of my glass. “Thanks for the wine. I’ve got to go get some dinner now. I’m meeting a friend.”
“You’re welcome and enjoy your evening,” he paused, and then added, “And don’t work like an ox!”
“Ha, nice one, Giulio. See you later.”
Two days later, a Friday, I found myself in the company headquarters on base, doing paperwork, shooting the shit with the platoon sergeant, and waiting for the company commander to give the weekend safety brief so we could all go home.
“Sir, did you see that leave request that Hunt and Faust put in for next weekend?” asked Sergeant First Class Rollins.
“Yeah, the commander already signed it,” I replied.
“What in the hell do two 19-year-old privates want to do in Greece?”
“Faust is twenty. I heard the plan was to visit Sparta. They’re part of the Spartan warrior fan club, I guess.”
“Ha! Hunt could barely pass sit-ups on the last APFT. Couple of knuckle-heads if you ask me, sir.”
“I don’t think they’ll find much to see there. They should stick to Athens.”
“I suppose you and the other LTs already been there on one of the last three-day weekends?”
“Yeah. Last November. What about you? Got any travel plans for the weekend?”
“I don’t get that big officer paycheck.”
“Come on, Sergeant. You must have plenty saved up from all those deployments.”
“It don’t go far after child support. Besides, got no interest in seeing more of this third-world country. Two years from now I’ll be back in Bragg.”
“You’re telling me you prefer backwoods North Carolina to this beautiful Mediterranean country with its ancient ruins and world-class art?”
“I didn’t go to college, sir. And I seen plenty of ancient ruins after we jumped into Iraq. This place ain’t much better.”
“What’s so bad here?”
“Roads are tiny, cars are tiny, coffees are tiny, buildings falling apart, shops never open, can’t find anything you want, nobody speaks English.”
“Yeah, but the food’s good.”
“I don’t go out to eat.”
“Not even to get pizza?”
“Had it once when I first got here. The crust was too thin and I had to cut my own slices.”
“You ever looked at the big building in the main square when we run by that way in the morning?”
“Sir, I ain’t got time to look at the architecture. I’m trying to keep tabs on my platoon, most of which are still half-drunk during P.T., including the squad leaders,” he said looking at me, and then after a brief pause, “And probably the officers.”
“What else are soldiers gonna do between deployments when you send them to Europe?”
“It’d be better if they weren’t allowed to leave the base. Stop a lot of the drunken fights downtown with locals every week.”
At this point the platoon’s four squad leaders walked into the office. “The guys are all in formation, sir,” said Staff Sergeant Garcia.
“Thanks, Sergeant,” I said.
The platoon sergeant sat back in his chair and propped his boots up on the table and said, “What’s the hurry? You boys don’t got nothing better to do than wait.”
“Listen, Sergeant Rollins and I were just discussing weekend plans and the relative merits of seeing the local sites. Let’s conduct a little survey: has anyone noticed any of the architecture in the main square?”
“I sure as hell know the bars!” said Staff Sergeant Courtney. “Galleria 15, Settimo Cielo, Grottino, Borsa.”
“There’s also those two columns, one with a lion or something,” added Garcia.
“Lots of gelaterias, too,” said Staff Sergeant LeBeau.
Sergeant First Class Rollins was smirking from his laid-back position of authority, and commented, “Bunch of jokers, sir. That’s an 11B for you.”
“Nobody ever noticed that huge building lined with columns and statues taking up, like, a third of the square?” “Oh yeah, something with a ‘b’,” said Courtney.
“Big-ass building,” said LeBeau.
“Baghdad bomb shelter,” attempted Garcia, weakly.
“Basilica Palladiana,” said the previously silent Staff Sergeant Monroe.
“That’s it,” I said, while the other NCOs eyed him warily. “Have you ever noticed those animal figures carved along the upper level? Bulls or possibly oxen?”
“Not really. But carving animals on old buildings used to be pretty common. The Ishtar Gate of Babylon was full of lions and aurochs, which are the ancestor of modern cows and oxen, for example.”
Now everyone, including me, stared at Monroe for a long moment, mouths slightly agape. “Sometimes you seem dumb as an ox, Monroe,” exclaimed Rollins. “And then sometimes you come up with some shit like that.”
“Where did you learn that?” I asked.
“There was a replica of the Ishtar Gate in Baghdad built by Saddam. I saw it when we were there.”
“I was too busy trying not to get blowed up,” said Courtney.
“That’s it. Drop down and give me fifty,” said Rollins, dead serious though he was still smirking.
“Let’s all knock ‘em out,” I said. Everyone in the room occupied six feet of floor space in the cramped office and started doing pushups.
Just then, the First Sergeant walked by and said in his usual screaming voice, “What are you second platoon idiots doing in here?”
“Trying to get in some extra P.T. while we wait for formation, First Sergeant,” said Garcia, happily.
“Well when you finish, get outside and join the ranks. The C.O.’s coming to give the safety brief in five minutes.”
“Got it, Top,” I said.
“Don’t call me Top, LT,” said the First Sergeant as he left the building.
“Let’s go then, men,” I said. We all brushed off our hands and straightened our uniforms and started filing out of the room. I said to the group in general, “So, anybody going away this weekend?”
“I’m going back to Florence to try to find some American college girls,” said Courtney.
I met Rachel the next morning and we started a walk up a seemingly endless sets of stone steps outside Vicenza.
“Do you ever run up here during P.T.?” I asked.
“Sometimes. At Brigade HQ we don’t do as much training as you hard-charging Infantry types,” she said.
“We did five laps sprinting up and down these steps on Monday,” I said between increasingly heavy breaths.
“Sounds like fun,” she said flashing the wide smile I had been thinking about all week. We finally reached the top landing where the path levelled off. From here there was a panorama of the city.
“It’s nice up here,” she said. “You can see all the way to the mountains up north.”
“Yeah, still snow on some of them.”
“I bet there are some great places to walk up there. Have you ever been?”
“We did a battalion staff ride up to Asiago last summer. It was mostly a chance for everyone to get drunk at the restaurant at the end,” I said. The intended joke didn’t come out as smooth as I had intended.
“You Infantry guys also seem to drink a lot,” she said still smiling, but with a more serious undertone.
“Can’t dispute that. Helps us feel better about being on the sharp end of the spear, I guess,” I said, before changing the subject. “Let’s keep going. We turn left up ahead to get to the Villa Rotonda.”
We followed a narrow cobble-stoned path down a gentle slope for a few minutes.
“Listen to this: yesterday I was asking my NCOs if they knew anything about Vicenza. It turns out that they only know about the bars, and probably strip clubs, to tell you the truth. Some of them never even really leave the base.”
“It’s probably intimidating for young guys who have never left their own towns and don’t know much about the world. From what I’ve seen, most of the guys in the army are more immature and naive than you would think, even the ones in their teens and early 20s,” she said while shooting me a quick side-eyed glance.
“Well, one of them, a silent, serious guy, knew all about the Basilica Palladiana and even started talking about the Ishtar Gate in Babylon. Apparently it was full of carvings of animals, including something called an aurochs. I had to look it up and it’s an extinct type of ox.”
“Maybe not all enlisted men are as dumb as you think, just because they signed their lives away in the army. No one forced us to sign up either, even if we’re officers.”
“Right. Seemed like a good idea at the time,” I joked, falling back on yet another tired cliche. “Anyway, I just remembered something about aurochs from Caesar’s De Bello Gallico. We had to read it in Latin at West Point. He talked about how the soldiers hunted them and used their horns as drinking cups. That’s what made me remember it.”
“Fascinating,” she said sarcastically. “I see you’re still into that oxen thing. You’ll be happy to know I solved your mystery with five minutes of research on the internet.”
“What is it?”
“The carved ox is called bucranium. It was common on ancient buildings to symbolize sacrifices to the gods. It was brought back during the Renaissance by neo-classical architects like Palladio.”
“Incredible, thanks.” I was fairly speechless and didn’t know how to continue the conversation, which seemed to be hopelessly stalling. “That just goes to show, I guess.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Something. Anyway, you learn something new everyday,” I responded stupidly.
We arrived at a closed gate through which we could see the perfectly symmetrical Villa Rotonda sitting upon a grassy hillock under an azure sky.
“It’s beautiful,” she said sizing up the impressive edifice. “Too bad we can’t go inside.” “I think it’s better-looking from outside,” I said quietly while looking at her. She was still looking up at the building.
We slowly circled around the stone wall to get a better view. There was silence for several minutes.
“So do you have any plans for the long weekend next month?” I asked.
“Actually, my boyfriend’s coming for a visit.”
I kept my stride and expression intact, while my brain furiously processed this new information.
“Oh. So what does he do?”
“He’s doing an MBA at Harvard Business School.”
“Wow.”
“That’s probably where my parents wanted me to be by now, too. It’s pretty boring hearing about business case studies all the time.”
“Right.”
“Anyway, he doesn’t want to go into the corporate world. He wants to work for an NGO.”
“Great.”
Silence again for a long moment.
“It’ll probably be hard to maintain a long-distance relationship while you’re deployed for a year or more,” I ventured.
“I’m not deploying to Afghanistan, Drew,” she said. I stopped walking and turned towards her to check if she was being serious. “As a logistics officer I’ll be on the rear detachment pushing supplies back and forth.”
“That makes sense,” I said as I resumed walking and looking straight ahead. “So you’ll have plenty of time to keep seeing the local sights.”
“I would imagine.”
“When we get back you’ll definitely know much more than me.”
“Most likely,” she said in a deadpan, before flashing her smile one more time.
“I must be dumb as an ox,” I added in a subdued tone.
“I wouldn’t say that,” she laughed. “Maybe just an ox-head.”
This is the sixth edition of my yearly reading list recap. After increasing my total number of books read each year for the first five years, this is the first time the number has decreased from the previous year (118 to 65, in this case). Either way, I apparently have read nearly 500 books over the last six years. During this “lighter” year that has just finished, most of what I read was quite enjoyable and worthy, but there were very few individual titles that I would add to my all-time favorites list. For what it’s worth, the longest title of the year was the colossal Les Miserables, which could easily count as five books.
Paper or E-Books (26):
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
Dalva by Jim Harrison
The Road Home by Jim Harrison
The Woman Lit by Fireflies by Jim Harrison
The Push by Tommy Caldwell
Washington Black by Esi Edugyan
If Beale Street could Talk by James Baldwin
Judas by Amos Oz
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Plague by Albert Camus
The Fall by Albert Camus
At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell
Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala
Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens
Mortality by Christopher Hitchens
Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis
Brief Encounters with Che Guevara by Ben Fountain
Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow
Herzog by Saul Bellow
The Chapo Guide to Revolution by Chapo Trap House
Talking Back, Talking Black by John McWhorter
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
Shame by Salman Rushdie
The Human Stain by Philip Roth
The Map of Knowledge by Violet Moller
Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman
Audiobooks (39):
The Souls of Black Folks by W.E.B. Dubois
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson
Mosses from an Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
What Maisie Knew by Henry James
The American by Henry James
My Life: Provincial by Anton Chekhov
Beast in the Jungle by Henry James
Studies in Pessimism by Arthur Schopenhauer
Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche
Twilight of the Idols by Friedrich Nietzsche
Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Omoo by Herman Melville
I Malavogli by Giovanni Verga
Canne al Vento by Grazia Deledda
Il Principe by Niccolò Machiavelli
The Inheritors by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford
Benito Cereno by Herman Melville
The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield
Theological Political Treatise by Benedict Spinoza
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume
A handsome couple strolled arm in arm down Central Park West. The man, tall and athletic with a thick, well-brushed mane, wore a black, fur-trimmed cloak over an Armani smoking jacket. The lady, slim but curvy with lustrous blonde hair done in a complicated braid, wore white mink over a low-cut black Prada gown. Though bedecked in high-heels, the lady adeptly kept up their brisk pace past tourists, joggers, baby-strapped mothers, and other assorted humanity either living in or making their pilgrimage to the world capital of wealth and culture. Curious eavesdroppers would have been able to hear snippets of the couple’s conversation as they passed.
Did you see who Angelica left with last night?
You mean the French gentleman? What’s his background?
Apparently his family owns the Laurent-Perrier champagne house. Why else would she look at him? By the way, what’s on the playbill tonight?
Let’s see, there’s Handel, Ravel, Mussorgsky, and of course Beethoven.
Is that the best Alan could come up with? Which Beethoven are they doing?
The Fifth.
How uninspired! We can’t be staying for the entire show, surely? I’d like to change before Camilla’s soirée. Oh look, is that Dmitri and Sveva over there?
They continued across the piazza, stepping past a beggar at the base of the steps before going up and into the packed lobby of the Lincoln Center.
Tigerpapers 