The 358 women of Verano. The life and obsessions of Marco C.

Three hundred and fifty-eight. That is the number of photographs hanging on the walls of the room or arranged on the furniture – a morbid, funeral-like display, a mortuary-style setting cutting through the still, twilight air of this glimpse of Verano, transposed into a Roman home. The scene could be lifted from a novel by Vitaliano Trevisan, although the fifteen thousand steps have been replaced by three hundred and fifty-eight photographs of women – faces smiling or frowning, young and not so young, in colour and in black and white. This desolate Via Crucis, like a wall of time—an effigy of that barren space of unspoken desires and tragic obsessions—has transformed the flat of fifty-five-year-old Marco C. into a necrosanctuary suspended somewhere between a Jörg Buttgereit film and the ossified stillness of tombs. His is a story of loneliness and desolation, of urban sadness—the sort that cuts right through your gut as you walk along the neon-lit streets at nightfall and reach Verano. Not nightclubs or pubs or an evening out with an unlikely flame, but that call, that amber-scented musk that wafts amongst gravestones and the shadows cast by cypress trees and darkened walls, whilst outside lie graffiti and scenes straight out of Roman hip-hop. Despite the criminal convictions and the clinical language of the trial and psychiatric reports, and despite the pain he inflicted on the relatives of the deceased—whose photographs he stole to take home and gaze at, consciously surrounding himself with them to feed an obsession—one of those insolent, visceral calls, can you imagine the burden that such a person carries in their flesh, in their heart and in the depths of their mind? Not to turn him into a necromantic hero or a victim – he has done terrible things and is accused of equally terrible acts, according to the court documents which also see him committed for trial for having stolen the urn containing the ashes of Elena A., but to try to imagine how much the desolation, the sense of the end, the breathless dread have seeped into his very being, so deeply as to make him a prisoner condemned by his own obsessions. He roams the Verano, moving cautiously but not too cautiously, given that the Carabinieri will catch him in the act; perhaps ‘grotesque’ would better convey the essence of this slithering, scowling hunter of objects and photographs; at home he has maps of the cemetery divided into zones that are not topographical but difficult to decipher. Could there be dealers in such funerary relics? Could there really be a market for certain mementoes and certain meagre remains? In America, it exists; every now and then, some thief of bones and funerary ornaments is caught red-handed and arrested. It’s likely there are some in Italy too. But he is not merely a foot soldier, someone who’s simply come up with a way to make some extra cash. At home, he has adorned the fridge, the walls and the drawers: those photos, those faces, those gazes are directed at him; they have become his world and his second skin, fetishes that tell tales of the past. There is no longer any boundary between life and death, in a horrific Roman version of Spoon River dictated by morbid fascination. His diary is the tale of a self-destruction, a degraded fable of endless solitude. A childhood spent in a convent school, no friends, no relationships, the darkest and most excruciating solitude as his only true companion, in a small flat right next to the Verano cemetery. That house near the cemetery. A diary in which he makes no secret of his passions, and of his love of gardening. With a screwdriver in hand, to pry the photographs loose from the marble slabs and gravestones, as if it were an extension of the pen with which, back home, he diligently jots down the names of the women who gaze at him – who now gaze back at him – from the photograph. He calls them by name, but this is not Ed Gein’s Plainfield; we are in Rome, behind the Verano. ‘Death shall have no more dominion,’ wrote the poet Dylan Thomas. For those who have never felt born or alive, this is how it is.