SALVE ROMA! A Felidae Novel - By Akif Pirincci Page 0,45
about. Crickets tried to out-clitter each other, the warm wind audibly petted the ruins that were mainly covered with grass. I got a lump in my throat from happiness, that I actually made it to this sanctum of civilization, and the gun salute, which I would have loved to shout out into the night, stuck in my throat: Hail ye, Rome!
Halfway up I had the chance to open myself to the ruins of this central square: from the three temples below the Senator’s Palace and Tabularium, the Dei Consentes (the twelve gods of Greek origin), the emperor Vespasian and the goddess Concordia, over to the Imperial Fora on the other side of the Via dei Fori Imperiali up to the Arch of Titus and the Colosseum. All this testimonials of the Western world’s origin towered in front of me like dark silhouettes, which began to reveal their secrets little by little with the beginning dawn. I pretended they were secrets. Actually, I had spent countless nights with Gustav in front of the fireplace, when he had revealed every secret of this golden Epoch with the aid of tons of books, and I, who I pretended to sleep in the middle of the documents, had done the same.
At the Forum the whole power and history of the city of Rome and the empire was reflected. The site had been a weely valley in the middle of the seven hills, on which the humans had settled at first. Here, the close connection of economy and justice, religion and politics, the increasing power and influence of the Roman state was documented with splendid buildings and gorgeous art. The representatives of public life, the tribune of the plebs, clerks, senators, consuls and emperors had been prettifying the center of their empire with impressive building and monuments for ages, where now newly built things right next to ancient and organized right next to accidentally originated built a densely developed complex.
Now the former hub of the world had become a ruined city, a dead city, in which at this lonely time maybe ghosts assembled, saw their life’s work crumbled and forfeited, and wept bitterly about that in a heart-touching choir.
»O you emperors, o you noble citizens of Rome, o you slaves, and not to forget o you fellows with pointed ears, who you certainly put the fear of God into the damn rats back in the day, o you masters of the universe!« I yelled at all those sad dead souls in my mind’s eye and believed my voice to resound quite impressively. »Don’t cry, you unrivaled, as your doing won’t be for the birds, nor for the cats if I’m allowed to throw in this pun. We are all doomed to die, and even the little we will deliver to posterity, like for example the Afro hairdo or the word ›Girlie‹, won’t last. Everything decays. The beautiful created by an aesthete will last forever and always. But also the poor devils who once had to carry and beat these rocks the whole blessed day and who after work probably never thought about the right color of wallpapers, shouldn’t be forgotten. You used to be a superpower, and no superpower in the world has ever created something more beautiful. If it was worth conquering the whole world for this, your excessive gods may judge that. But whatever you created, you always spoke for the whole mankind. Not much will last in the breathless stream of history, but this will!«
Thus I talked to the ghosts in moonlight and believed to get a note of thanks from them in the shape of a suddenly upspringing gust of wind. From my elevated position I couldn’t see either the any sign of a human soul or of any other creature in this ancient silhouette landscape. Even the birds hadn’t started with their singing and chattering yet, so at the silver shimmering giant square I began to feel like at an abandoned megalomaniac stage setting.
And again I was about to hold a rather elegiac speech: »O Antonio, you pink black one, you cronista di Roma, where are you now that I need you so much? You queen of my heart, who let me eat delicious trash, you, who feathered my nest with velvet cushions just like you had promised, can you maybe stop snoring, move your butt and kindly look for me! Otherwise I will develop some serious aversion for you queers! God, I need you so!«