The Rotten Bridge

by Paul McConnell | c. 2002

To be in Roma, you get the sense that it just might be the greatest city in the Western World. Certainly nothing in America can come close. And as for Europe, Vienna is a hick town and Paris, a fair rival, is still coming up nearly 1000 years empty. Rome on the other hand is so settled, so firm, so casual in its colossal nature that it disappears before my eyes. For all its greatness it has achieved a sort of aloofness on a grand scale. An anonymity, a quiet, massing, skulking anonymity, so that as I walk along, the monuments, especially the ones of Roman origin, do little more than wink at me to get my attention.

Great decaying towers of brick and stone appear and disappear, quietly circling the city carrying the delicate water that flows everywhere for free. Wavering colonnades of marble, literally under the streets, hold up the latest version of this city and look up at me as I pass. Massive arches stand as portals of another time that are roped off now, behind a linked fence on display for the visiting Society of Gynecologists, or the Sisters of St. Marks, Minneapolis, St. Paul. And as I look at the scale of the Arch of Constantine, for instance, I realize that it was built to honor a god among us - some lordly ornate cockring to the other side but then again, Cyclops might have easily tossed it in a game of horseshoes.

But like I said, there is something about it all that imparts to me the private delight of discovery. Even as I walk down Via Cavour, for the second or third time that day, I still arrive at the Forum, spread out before me and growing out of the weeds and hillsides, the lost world that it is, and every time my mind and viscera become one. All notions of shopping and food and gorging myself and fucking someone and getting across town give way to a perfectly placed and pleasant sense of awe like it's the first time. I can't quell it or pass it off like yesterday's visit to the museum or church.

No, there it is before me. It is not hard to squint and see all the visitors down below in full costume, donning gilt coronets and glowing white tunics, arriving in polished chariots, swinging great silver goblets and smoldering pots. The apparitions alight on ambrosial sandals among the great carts of wood and vegetables and fresh slaughter. Step down for an instant, into this world and drink from a fountain, enter the coolness of all that great stone. They walk in the shade of laurel and olive and oleander until the evening star comes on, and there, in the flicker of tallow torch, in the vespertine shadows, see the long sharp noses and the round over fed faces. See the oracle, the council, the guards, the servants, the attendant great feast in honor of the Patricia. Hear the dry, weary shuffle through the streets. Know that the seriousness of running an empire weighs heavy and hence the whispers and wine dark dealings behind the sweaty walls of secrecy.

As a tourist in Rome I am a prisoner herded through these streets, chained to a cheering group about the ankles and wrists as we are marched down the Palatine. We are the shadows, ghosts from a world already gone on too long and yet we are deceived and jubilant. The ramifications of which are none really, for in the end we all pass the earth over, servant and senator, liberator, patrician, ship builder, wine maker, general, commander, salaried secretary, software builder, analyst, and stock broker. Slaves of birth, love slaves to the world forever, marching down the hill in a hurry of dust out of which we believe we have risen. At the mercy of a rickety concept of creation, there is a murmur through our ranks that some prize awaits us at the bottom. Perhaps it is another crowded water fountain or some lions feeding on a Christian or maybe a lick at the eternal flame of Vesta for everyone. And there, as we are plunged down the hill, looming over us and rising up is the great Coliseum. To see it like this I want to believe that instead of being torn down by time it is just being built - its birthday cake arches circling over the gentle slope of windswept cypress look merely as if a giant has taken a bite out of the marbled cake.  

But like I said, walking down Cavour - set a few blocks off on my left down any of several long streets such as via Annibaldi or del Colosseo for instance - there it sits, squat, on time, skulking - a towering chain of pig nostrils chortling and snorting under the blue vault. Like a piece of the world it sits there and again, it rises up just enough in the corner of my eye as I pass the mouth of one of those long streets and I hear it, psst, just in time to glance left. My heart jumps so high in my throat that my feet leave the ground. That such a monumental building could be so graceful and so subtle, it eviscerates me momentarily. That is my own offering to the gods, between us my heart but for a moment, and then I am back among the living, completely across the mouth of the street and again pondering the caffes, the pasticceria, the bars, the fresh display of fish and clams on ice, the smell of garlic and eggplant and bread, a pizza, a gelato, film for my camera, a pack of cigarettes.

The ululating tapestry of the sidewalk, the mosaic of dire need and want, the travertine doorways calling me in close, the basalt cobbled street discouraging an expert on heels, and the street itself is a fortification. Those four story palazzi blocked together in one arrow-straight line of brick and shutter, of their own enduring squat and firm consequence balancing a mere five or six centuries upheld.

But the point is and always will be Il Colosseo as it is seen from a distance. As I cross yet another street mouth and it is still there, in virtually the same position, moving with me perhaps, and I get the same sensation as when you view a mountain from a speeding car. That I am on the great treadmill Earth as men of all time have been and noticed. And here I stand in their stead, and here I walk in their steps through these time-streets. Here I breathe in their air, bask in their sun, drink their water, and lust after their children. And lording over it all sadly is that radio premonition in the back of my head. Could be God? Telling you to enjoy it while it lasts because Hermes will be along soon enough to poke you with his magic stick and send me on my way. And like Odysseus, I will lash together a feeble raft and go home.  >

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Photographs:

Colosseum, Rome, by Kindra Clineff
Trevi Fountain at Night, Rome, Italy, by Walter Bibikow

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