It is April in Rome and the air is 28 degrees and partly cloudy, the kind of sky that cannot decide whether to bless or to punish, and this indecision is itself a form of cruelty, for those who wait beneath it must go on waiting. I have known such skies all my life. They hung over this city during the last war, when the women of San Lorenzo pulled bread from ovens while the bombs fell, and they hang over it now, in this new war that is not called a war here but is a war everywhere else.
They say the American blockade of the Strait of Hormuz continues. They say the president has declared the conflict "close to over," that a second round of talks may be held in Pakistan, that negotiations are progressing. These are the words of men who sit in rooms with polished tables and believe that the arrangement of words upon paper is the same as the cessation of suffering. I have known such men. They appeared in every chapter of the century I lived through – signing treaties in Versailles, signing pacts in Munich, signing armistices that were only intermissions in the same endless opera of blood. The American treasury secretary has said that "a small bit of economic pain" is worth it for long-term security. I wonder if he has met the migrant workers in Dubai who have been furloughed, whose pay has been cut, who face repatriation to countries they left because there was nothing there for them. A small bit of pain. How easily that phrase is spoken by those who will never feel it.
And yet there are stirrings. In Washington, the ambassadors of Israel and Lebanon have sat across from one another for the first time in over three decades. Since 1993, these two nations have communicated only through intermediaries, through the grammar of artillery and the syntax of border incursions. Now they speak directly, though the American officials caution that "more time is needed." More time is always needed. More time was needed in 1943, when the Jews of Rome were rounded up beneath a sky not unlike today's – partly cloudy, indecisive, 28 degrees perhaps, or perhaps not, but certainly indifferent. The sky does not take sides. That is its privilege and its shame.
Meanwhile, in the Indian Ocean, a trawler has sunk. Two hundred and fifty human beings are missing. The United Nations tells us the vessel went down "due to heavy winds, rough seas and overcrowding." Overcrowding. That word contains an entire history – the history of people who had no room where they were and sought room elsewhere and found, in the end, only the room the sea provides, which is infinite and admits everyone but saves no one. I think of Useppe, my little Useppe from my novel that was not a novel but a chronicle of what history does to those who have no history of their own. He would not have understood the word "overcrowding." He would have understood only the cold of the water and the absence of his mother's hand.
The newspapers will print the number – 250 – and the number will sit on the page like all numbers do, neat and self-contained, betraying nothing of the 250 separate universes that each of those souls contained. A woman who remembered the smell of her grandmother's kitchen. A boy who had once caught a fish and never stopped talking about it. A girl who sang. These are not things that appear in the ledgers of international agencies. They are the things that disappear when a trawler sinks in the Indian Ocean and the world turns its gaze to the negotiations in Washington.
In Hungary, Viktor Orbán has fallen. His former ally, Péter Magyar, has defeated him in a landslide, and the commentators speak of the end of an era, of the death of a certain kind of populism, of the possibility of change. I have seen such changes before. I saw Mussolini fall, and then I saw what came after Mussolini, and I learned that the fall of a tyrant is not the same as the rise of justice. It is merely the rearrangement of chairs. The American vice-president, who had supported Orbán and called him "a great guy," now says he is sure he can work with Magyar. Of course he can. Power always finds a way to work with power. It is only the powerless with whom power cannot be bothered.
In Sudan, the war enters its fourth year. Fifty thousand dead, and still the world cannot muster the urgency to stop it. A reporter trapped inside the country has had her phone turned on for the first time in three years, and the messages have poured in – a deluge of words from a silence so long it had become its own kind of death. Three years of messages arriving at once. Three years of "are you alive?" and "please respond" and "we are thinking of you" compressed into a single moment of connection. I know something of this. During the war – my war, the one I lived through – there were people who disappeared into silences that lasted not three years but forever. And when the silence ended, it was not because the phone turned on. It was because someone found a name on a list.
Italy, my Italy, has announced it will not renew its defence agreement with Israel. Prime Minister Meloni has declared that Italy will not participate in the American and Israeli military operations against Iran. There was a time when such a declaration would have seemed like courage. Now it seems merely like calculation – the arithmetic of a nation that has learned, through centuries of foreign domination, that the safest position is the one that offends the fewest. But perhaps I am too harsh. Perhaps there is a genuine refusal here, a small rebellion of conscience in a world that has made conscience a luxury.
The Pope – this new Pope Leo – has gone to Algeria, to the land of Augustine, and the theologians say his understanding of Augustine's teachings has informed his response to those who attack him. Augustine, who knew that the City of God and the City of Man are entangled beyond any mortal's ability to separate them. Augustine, who understood that history is not progress but pilgrimage – a stumbling, uncertain walk toward something that may or may not be there when we arrive.
In Canada, Mark Carney has secured his majority government. In Benin, a new president has won with 94 percent of the vote. In Nigeria, survivors of a military airstrike on a market – a "precision airstrike," the army calls it, though up to 200 civilians are dead – ask why. Always why. It is the question that history refuses to answer.
The sky above Rome is still partly cloudy. Twenty-eight degrees. The tourists are eating gelato near the Colosseum, that monument to a civilisation that believed watching men die was entertainment. We have not changed so very much. We have only learned to watch from a greater distance, through screens, through headlines, through the thin membrane of language that separates us from the reality of what we permit. Two hundred and fifty people are missing in the Indian Ocean. The sky does not take sides. But we could. We could, if we chose to. That is the difference between the sky and us. The sky has no choice in its indifference. We have every choice in ours.
