The light over Rome this May is the colour of an apricot left too long on a windowsill, and the temperature climbs to twenty-seven degrees beneath a sky only partly clouded, as though the heavens themselves cannot decide whether to weep or to look away. From my window I can see the swallows, who do not read newspapers, cutting their geometries above the rooftops; and below them, in the streets that have known the boots of legions and the hobnails of every conqueror Europe ever produced, the citizens move with the soft hurry of people who have agreed, by tacit and ancient pact, not to mention what is happening at the edges of the world.
But the world has edges no longer. It has only one membrane, and a wound at any point becomes a wound at every point. So it is, today, that the Strait of Hormuz – that narrow throat of water through which the planet drinks its dark and complicated milk – has opened its mouth to scream. American warships shoot down missiles and drones; Iranian fast boats are struck; oil leaps in price by six percent in a single morning, like a horse that has felt the spur. A Korean vessel is attacked at anchor. A drone, blind and patient as a moth, finds an oil facility in the Emirates. The freighters now move under American escort, and one Maersk ship, flying the stars and stripes, has slipped through the Strait into the open sea, accompanied by guns the way a child is accompanied by a frightened mother through a dangerous quarter at dusk.
I have lived long enough, dear readers, and written enough pages, to recognize the choreography. It is the same dance, with new costumes. The thing called History, which the schoolbooks insist upon capitalizing, is in truth a scandal – a scandal that has lasted ten thousand years and shows no inclination to end. It does not learn. It does not improve. It only changes its dialects.
Listen to its dialects today.
In Moscow, on a high floor of a luxury apartment block where the windows look out over the river and the gilded domes, a Ukrainian drone has come knocking, three days before the great Victory Day parade. The Russians, who once defeated Napoleon and Hitler in those same streets, now move their parade behind concrete barriers and announce a unilateral ceasefire of their own design: two days only, beginning the eighth, while Kyiv claims its own ceasefire begins the sixth, and so the very calendar is conscripted into the lie. Meanwhile, on a continent the Kremlin once pretended to liberate, young men from Cameroon, from Senegal, from Kenya are recruited with promises of factory jobs in St. Petersburg, given uniforms instead of wages, and pushed forward into trenches whose geography they cannot pronounce. They die for an empire that was never theirs, beneath a flag they were shown only after their passports had been taken.
This is what the powerful have always called strategy. It is what the mothers of those young men, when at last the news reaches them, will call by another word.
In Mali, the junta leader has named himself defence minister, his predecessor having been killed in a great combined offensive of jihadists and separatists. This phrase means, in plain language, that the Sahel is burning and no one is sending a bucket. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, a rebel group linked to ISIL has tortured, abducted, and slaughtered civilians, and among those civilians are children, who are not yet old enough to understand the distinction between an ideology and a knife. Their mothers will understand it. Mothers always understand these distinctions, eventually, and at terrible cost.
In Nablus, in the West Bank, on a morning indistinguishable from any other May morning, a child is born. His father, the day before, was shot dead by Israeli forces during a raid. The child has a name, a weight, a small clenched fist; he has, already, an inheritance. He has inherited the absence at the head of his crib. He has inherited the smell of olive trees and gunpowder mixed in the same wind. The world, distracted by the larger fires in the Gulf, looks past him; settlers in the West Bank intensify their attacks while the cameras face elsewhere; in Gaza City an Israeli strike sets a fire among civilians, and the flames climb upward as flames have always climbed, indifferent to the headlines they will or will not generate. The newborn in Nablus does not yet know that he is a citizen of a world that has decided, once again, to look the other way. He will discover this, gradually, as we all do.
And on the great oceans, where the cruise ships glide like illuminated cities, a virus carried by a small rodent has killed three on the MV Hondius (a Dutch couple, a German), and a British crew member is now in urgent need of medical care. Hantavirus, the doctors say. The ship is denied port. It floats off Cape Verde like a leper colony in white paint. Even our pleasures, you see, are no longer safe; even our holidays carry the ancient stowaway. A mouse can fell an empire of leisure. The plagues of the Iliad were caused by Apollo's arrows; ours are caused by mice. The grandeur has gone out of our calamities, but not the suffering.
Meanwhile, in the suburbs of advanced economies, the humanoid robots are arriving in the waste-sorting plants, because no human can be persuaded any longer to do that work for those wages. The machines pluck the plastic from the cardboard with their patient, tireless fingers. They do not require pensions. They do not have newborns in Nablus. They will not be lured into anyone's war.
This afternoon, an American Secretary of State will fly into Rome to meet our new pontiff, Leo XIV, who has displeased the President of his native country by suggesting that the bombing of cities is, perhaps, not entirely consistent with the Gospels. There will be photographs taken on the marble steps. There will be expressions of mutual respect. The Pope will speak of mercy in the language of two thousand years, and the Secretary will nod, and outside on the Via della Conciliazione the swallows will continue their indifferent geometries, and the temperature will hold near twenty-seven degrees, and the apricot light will tilt slowly westward over the dome of St. Peter's as it has tilted every May since long before any of us were born.
This is the scandal of which I speak. It is so old that we have stopped noticing it is a scandal. We call it the news. We call it current affairs. We pour it into our morning coffee and we drink it down and we go to work.
But somewhere a child is being born in Nablus, and somewhere a young man from Yaoundé is dying in mud he cannot name, and somewhere a tanker is pushing through Hormuz under foreign guns, and somewhere a robot is sorting our garbage while we sleep.
History is not a thing that happened. It is a thing that is happening. And its first and last and only protagonist, dear readers, the one whose name appears on no treaty and is carved on no monument, is the small, the unnamed, the unprotected, who will go on bearing it, as they have always borne it, until at last someone consents to write them into the book.
