Signor B.
I am condemned to interview my nightmares;
to maintain a correct, mildly supplicant pose
as long as the tape is running.
By now I should myself be interviewed,
throwing out misdirections, obiter dicta,
apothegms, charm. Being solid, meaning something,
which I could then evade, deny, and mock.
My only consolation is that while
I ask the questions I am safe from the answers,
enjoying a privileged, tourist status
in a world of contempt I subtly enfold in my own.
As now, beneath an awning
on a street of awnings and tables,
where diminutive cars jockey
around an enormous fountain with gods and nymphs,
and the driver of a scooter leans and snags
a purse from a shoulder, then speeds professionally off,
and the waiter sets down my subject’s
Pernod and Pellegrino and, more sloppily, mine.
Immaculate and formal in this heat,
unable to choose among
the venom, condescension, and detachment
my interviewees adopt, Signor B.
employs the third of these, describing
his bombing of a train station in the Seventies;
the second when, inevitably,
I ask about innocent lives. “No one is innocent,”
he says. “The point of terror
is that it proclaims a new Law, even a new calendar.
People will live henceforth by its demands
or join those who were killed as an example.”
He admits to a certain ambivalence
about suicide bombers. “On the one hand,
courage, of course, commitment;
on the other, they are after all – ”
(he smiles at me broadly) “Semites.
Hysterics. Some of my friends
have found in Islam a spiritual home
and political *point d’appui; I resist this option.”
“The virgins don’t attract you,” I say. He shrugs:
“Narcissism … a typical
(if I may say so) confusion
of private and collective salvation.
The new world is not merely built
upon the ruins of the old, it *is those ruins,
which those who made should rule. My own
few years in prison were an inconvenience,
not a martyrdom.”
I ask what his guiding principle
and that of his like-minded friends is now.
He reminisces about the Master,
whose name he will not allow me to use;
to whom he was privileged to listen,
as a young man, in the shadow of heavy drapes,
among the Tantric charts and the sculptures of gods.
Who spoke of the beauty and focus,
the *seriousness (“so unlike us”) of the SS.
And of that one Tradition,
that Knowledge of a higher realm
no single creed has fully grasped but which,
when the Jewish god and his epigones
are deposed, will again bring
the gifts of caste and of obedience.
“Democracy,” he says, “which … people like you
believe is a motor, is only wheels and seats;
the motor, such as it was, is running down.”
But by now he is too, an old man
fanning himself, satisfied
to sit and sip, and talk, even to me;
wondering to some slight extent, perhaps,
what lies behind my impassive gaze. We turn
to art. He seems surprised
that I know his Master, Evola
(I speak the name, but he doesn’t leave),
began as a Dadaist. “He renounced
that decadence.” When I wave this off,
he says, “Of course you won’t accept that term.”
I say, “I think the visual arts
can do as they like. My main concern
is poetry. Which loses,
I think, when it assumes
that words are just a picture, not a window.”
“Upon the Ideal,” he nods.
I smile at him rather coldly,
turn off the tape and say,
“On whatever arc of history
we can perceive through it,
however much our fears constrict what we see.
And all the possibilities and dangers
of a world where, as Blake said,
whatever can be believed is an image of truth.”
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