PRIMO LEVI SQUARE Moroccan boys punt a football round the police car guard below the synagogue�s onion-bulbed turrets. Neighbours curse the noise, but the police know their work; sports pages to read and guns to aim at passing prams. Outside the Jewish school, I nod at the junkie shooting up by the nursery gate. A transvestite prostitute hunches on a bollard, flutters eyelashes like drowning butterflies. My tiles are terracotta, my ceiling curves, my Hebrew murals huddle under whitewash. My terrace overlooks this square where nothing recalls the man who dived from a third floor landing but survived a Nazi Lager, other than the street sign, piazzetta Primo Levi, not a piazza, diminutive even in his home town, as if people want to remember, but not much. Alex the Kapo wiped his hands on the rag of Levi�s shoulder. A day�s work got a slice of bread in the Gestapo chemical factories. An Armani jacket is worth how much? The police slap their papers on the dashboard. A Fiat Cinquecento has parked too close so they dismantle it with a chisel and screwdriver, carry out a controlled explosion just as the owner exits the Health Food Store with a pack of sunflower seeds. Since the Rome attack of eighty-two you can�t be too careful, they explain. She walks away mollified; for it is Rosh Hashanah, the shofar must blast again, the hiddur mitzvah the same as last year and the years before that. An elderly nun crosses the square chanting Latin. The footballers break until she�s past, all of this captured by the surveillance camera, which bends from the parapet like a vulture waiting for the action to stop. I step onto via Pio V, the old pope�s road parallel to corso Vittorio Emanuele, father of the secular nation, and leave the boys to the game. Though scores may be settled, tomorrow�s rain can�t shower away all evidence of today. Note on Hebrew terms: Rosh Hashanah = New Year Shofar = trumpets Hiddur mitzvah = the concept of making an ordinary occasion special, unrepeatable, unique. |