In the new century, the one I will never see, 5 million
dollars will be the figure used by insurance companies
for a human life—for one death, for what Henry James
used to call “the distinguished thing,” because if some
say death is a theft, others say it is only an editing tool
that gives every life a place in the universe, and only
Madame de Staël, ever the contrarian, liked to say that
in life there are only beginnings, although she might
not remember that because by now she is dead too.

There are no trains going through Vatican City
tonight. Nobody can lie on the tracks to die or take
Catholics away, but in just a few years, by October
1943, the life of an Italian Jewish man will be worth
5,000 lire—3,000 for a woman, 1,000 for a child,
which I know for a fact because in psychoanalysis
foreclosure refers to the definitive erasure of an event
from one’s psychic memory—only death doesn’t erase
the present, it frames it like a strip of sensitive film bathed
in the pink sunsets of Rome, my Rome, the city of my dreams.

At sunrise the end will freeze me like a lake trout
preserved in vinegar, and in the days to come the old
shape will give way to the swollen bulbs of the eyes
and the saintly bony hands that shook those Other
Manic Hands, and dawn will cover the light ruffling
of folded papers, my sketches, my drawers empty,
and it will be the picture of a picture, like the white
smoke out of the Vatican’s chimney, like waiting
but slower, because in the spring of 1941 young,
charming Gudrun Himmler will visit Dachau
with her father for the first time, and she will
write in her diary, “We saw the well, the mill,
the bees. We saw everything, even the prisoners’
paintings, and they were magnificent.”

 

 

---

Silvia Valisa is associate professor of Italian studies at Florida State University. She is a scholar of Italian modernity (print culture and Fascism) as well as a poet and a translator.

 

 

 

Photo by Benjamin Fay on Unsplash